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Dialogues and On ClemencyConsolation to His Mother Helvia
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Consolation to His Mother Helvia

1 Often before now, best of mothers, I have felt the impulse to console you, and often I have held it back. Many things urged me to dare it. First, I thought I would be laying down all my troubles if I could at least wipe away your tears for a while, even if I could not stop them; then I had no doubt that I would have more authority to rouse you if I had first risen up myself; besides, I was afraid that Fortune, beaten by me, might beat someone else of my family. And so, as best I could, I kept trying, my hand pressed over my own wound, to crawl forward and bind up your wounds. Then again there were things that held this purpose of mine back. I knew I must not confront your grief while it was fresh and raging, or the very comforts might provoke and inflame it, for in illness too nothing is more harmful than medicine given too soon; so I waited until it had broken its own strength and, softened by time to bear remedies, would let itself be touched and handled. Besides, when I unrolled all the works of the most illustrious minds composed to check and moderate mourning, I found no example of anyone who had consoled his family while he himself was being lamented by them; so in this new situation I hesitated, and I feared that this would be not consolation but a reopening of the sore. What of the fact that a man lifting his head from his own pyre to console his family needed new words, not taken from common, everyday speech? And every grief so great that it passes all measure must take away the choice of words, since often it shuts off the voice itself. Still, I will make the attempt as best I can, not from confidence in my talent, but because I, the consoler, can myself be the most effective consolation. You would deny me nothing; and though all grief is stubborn, I hope you will not deny me this one thing: to let me set a limit to your longing.

2 See how much I have promised myself from your kindness: I do not doubt that I will have more power over you than your grief, and nothing has more power over the wretched. So, not to clash with it at once, I will first take its side and heap up everything that may rouse it; I will bring everything out and tear open what has already scarred over. Someone will say: “What kind of consolation is this, to call back forgotten ills and set a mind that can barely endure one sorrow in full view of all its sufferings?” But let him reflect that disorders so dangerous that they have grown strong against remedy are usually cured by their opposites. So I will bring before your mind all its sorrows, all its mourning: this will be healing not by a gentle method but by cautery and the knife. What will I gain? That a mind that has conquered so many miseries will be ashamed to take hard one wound in a body so covered with scars. Let those weep longer and moan whose delicate minds long prosperity has unnerved, and let them collapse at the stir of the slightest wrongs; but let those whose every year has passed through calamities bear even the heaviest with brave and unmoved constancy. Constant misfortune has one good: those whom it always harasses it hardens in the end.

Fortune has given you no respite from the heaviest mournings; she did not except even the day of your birth. You lost your mother as soon as you were born, no, while you were being born, and you were in a way exposed to life. You grew up under a stepmother, whom you, by all the obedience and devotion that can be seen even in a daughter, compelled to become a mother; yet even a good stepmother costs everyone dear. Your most affectionate uncle, an excellent and very brave man, you lost while you were awaiting his arrival; and so that Fortune would not lighten her savagery by spacing it out, within thirty days you buried your dearest husband, by whom you were the mother of three children. The news of this mourning reached you while you were already mourning, and while all your children were away, as though your ills had been deliberately crowded into that time so that your grief would have nowhere to lean. I pass over so many dangers, so many fears, which you endured as they assaulted you without a pause: only lately, only lately, you took back into the same lap from which you had sent forth three grandchildren the bones of three grandchildren; within twenty days after you had buried my son, who died in your hands and amid your kisses, you heard that I had been carried off.1 This was all you still lacked: to mourn the living.

3 The fresh wound is the heaviest of all that have ever come down on your body, I admit; it has not broken the surface of the skin, it has cleft your breast and your very vitals. But just as raw recruits, though only lightly wounded, still cry out and dread the hands of the doctors more than the sword, while veterans, though run through, let their wounds be cleansed patiently and without a groan, as if the bodies were someone else’s, so you must now submit bravely to treatment. Put away laments and wailing and the other things by which a woman’s grief usually makes its uproar; for you have wasted all those ills if you have not yet learned how to be wretched. Do I seem to have dealt with you without timidity? I have kept back nothing of your ills, but have set them all before you in a heap.

4 I did this with a great spirit; for I have resolved to conquer your grief, not to hem it in. And I will conquer it, I think, first if I show that I suffer nothing for which I could myself be called wretched, still less anything for which I would make wretched even those close to me; then if I turn to you and prove that not even your fortune is heavy, since it depends entirely on mine.

I will take up first what your devotion longs to hear: that nothing bad has befallen me. If I can, I will make it plain that the very things by which you think me weighed down are not unbearable; but if that cannot be believed, I at least will be the better pleased with myself for being happy amid the things that usually make men wretched. There is no reason for you to believe others about me: I myself tell you, so that you may not be troubled by uncertain rumors, that I am not wretched. I will add, to make you freer of care, that I cannot even be made wretched.

5 We were born on good terms, if we do not abandon them. Nature saw to it that living well would need no great apparatus: each one of us can make himself happy. External things carry little weight and have no great power either way: prosperity does not lift up the wise man, nor does adversity bring him down; for he has always worked to place as much as he can in himself, to seek all his joy from himself. What then? Do I call myself a wise man? Not at all; if I could claim that, I would not only deny that I am wretched but would proclaim myself the most fortunate of all men, brought into the neighborhood of god. As it is, and this is enough to soften all miseries, I have given myself to wise men, and, not yet strong enough to help myself, I have fled to another’s camp, the camp, of course, of those who easily protect themselves and their own. They have ordered me to stand always on watch, as if posted at a guard station, and to foresee every attempt of Fortune, every onrush, long before it strikes. Fortune is heavy for those to whom she comes suddenly; the man who always expects her easily withstands her. For an enemy’s arrival too overwhelms those it catches unawares; but those who have prepared themselves for the coming war before the war, drawn up and equipped, easily take the first blow, which is the most violent. I never trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to be keeping the peace; all the things she most kindly bestowed on me, money, offices, influence, I put where she could take them back without disturbing me. I kept a wide distance between them and myself; so she has taken them away, not torn them away. No one is broken by adverse fortune unless he was first deceived by favorable fortune. Those who loved her gifts as if they were their own and lasting, who wanted to be looked up to because of them, lie prostrate and grieve when false and fickle delights abandon their empty and childish minds, which know nothing of solid pleasure; but the man who was not puffed up by happy times does not shrink when they change. Against either condition he keeps an unconquered mind whose firmness has already been tested; for in good fortune itself he has tried what would hold against misfortune. So I have always judged that there is no true good in the things everyone wishes for; and then I found them empty, daubed over with a showy and deceptive paint, with nothing inside like their outward face. And now, in the things called evils, I find nothing so terrible and harsh as the opinion of the crowd threatened. The word itself, indeed, by a kind of conviction and general agreement, now falls more harshly on the ear and strikes the hearer as something grim and accursed: so the people has decreed; but the decrees of the people are for the most part repealed by the wise.

6 Setting aside, then, the judgment of the majority, who are carried away by the first appearance of things, however it has come to be believed, let us see what exile is. A change of place, obviously. So that I may not seem to narrow its force and take away whatever is worst in it, let me add that disadvantages follow this change of place: poverty, disgrace, contempt. I will fight against these later; meanwhile I want to look first at what bitterness the change of place itself brings.

“To be without one’s country is unbearable.” Come, look at this throng, for which the houses of the vast city are barely enough: the greater part of that crowd is without its country. They have streamed in from their towns and colonies, in short from the whole world: some were brought by ambition, some by the necessity of public office, some by an embassy laid on them, some by luxury seeking a convenient place rich in vices, some by the desire for liberal studies, some by the shows; some were drawn by friendship, some by energy that found ample scope for displaying its virtue; some have brought their beauty for sale, some their eloquence for sale. There is no kind of human being that has not flocked into the city, which sets high prices on both virtues and vices. Have all of them called by name and ask each one where he comes from: you will see that the greater part have left their own homes and come to a city that is indeed the greatest and most beautiful, but not theirs. Then leave this city, which may be called the common city of all, and go around all the cities: there is none that does not have a large share of foreign population. Pass by those whose pleasant site and convenient region attract more people; go through deserted places and the roughest islands, Sciathus and Seriphus, Gyara and Cossura: you will find no place of exile where someone is not staying of his own free will. What can be found so bare, so steep on every side, as this rock? What more barren, if you look at its resources? What more savage, if you look at its people? What more forbidding, if you look at the lie of the land? What more intemperate, if you look at its climate? Yet more foreigners than natives live here. So far, then, is the change of place itself from being a hardship that even this place has drawn some away from their country. I find people who say that there is in minds a certain natural restlessness that drives them to change their abode and move their dwelling; for man has been given a mind that is mobile and restless; it never keeps still, it scatters itself and sends its thoughts out into all things known and unknown, roving, impatient of rest, and happiest in novelty. You will not wonder at this if you look at its first origin: it is not formed of earthly and heavy matter, it came down from that heavenly spirit; and the nature of heavenly things is always in motion, fleeing and driven on at the swiftest pace. Look at the stars that light the universe: not one of them stands still. The sun glides on continually and changes from place to place, and though it turns with the whole, it is nonetheless carried in the direction opposite to the universe itself; it runs through all the signs of the zodiac and never halts; its movement is perpetual, its migration from one place to another. All things are always revolving and in passage; as law and the necessity of nature have ordained, they are carried from one place to another; when they have unrolled their circuits over fixed spaces of years, they will go again through the places they came from. Go now and suppose that the human mind, made of the same seeds as divine beings, resents passage and migration, when the nature of god delights in constant and very swift change, or preserves itself by it.

7 Come, turn from heavenly things to human: you will see that whole nations and peoples have changed their homes. What are Greek cities doing in the midst of barbarian lands? What is the Macedonian tongue doing among Indians and Persians? Scythia and that whole region of wild and untamed tribes displays cities of Achaea planted on the shores of the Black Sea: neither the savagery of an endless winter nor the temper of the men, as rough as their climate, stopped those who moved their homes there. There is a crowd of Athenians in Asia; Miletus has poured out the population of seventy-five cities in every direction; the whole coast of Italy washed by the Lower Sea was Greater Greece. Asia claims the Etruscans as her own; Tyrians live in Africa, Carthaginians in Spain; Greeks thrust themselves into Gaul, Gauls into Greece; the Pyrenees did not block the passage of the Germans. Human restlessness has made its way through trackless and unknown places. They dragged their children and wives and parents heavy with age. Some, tossed about by long wandering, did not choose a place by judgment but in weariness took the nearest; others made themselves a right in a foreign land by arms; some nations the sea swallowed up as they sought unknown lands; some settled where the lack of everything set them down. Nor did all have the same reason for leaving their country and seeking one: some, escaping the destruction of their cities by enemy arms, were driven into foreign lands stripped of their own; some were removed by civil strife at home; some were sent out by an overcrowded and overflowing population, to relieve its strength; some were cast out by plague, or frequent chasms in the earth, or some unbearable flaws of an unlucky soil; some were seduced by the fame of a fertile shore, praised beyond its worth. Different reasons roused different peoples from their homes; this at least is plain: nothing has remained in the place where it was born. The human race is forever on the move; every day something changes in so great a world: new foundations of cities are laid, new names of nations arise as the old ones are extinguished or absorbed into a stronger one. And what are all these migrations of peoples but public exiles? Why do I drag you around so long a circuit? What is the point of listing Antenor, the founder of Padua, and Evander, who set up the kingdom of the Arcadians on the bank of the Tiber? Or Diomedes and the others whom the Trojan War scattered through foreign lands, conquered and conquerors alike?2 The Roman empire, after all, looks back to an exile as its founder, a refugee from his captured country, dragging a scant remnant with him, whom necessity and fear of the victor carried to Italy as he sought distant lands. And how many colonies this people has since sent into every province! Wherever the Roman has conquered, he lives. For this change of place men gladly gave in their names, and the old man left his altars and followed the colonists across the seas. The subject does not need a longer list; but I will add one example that thrusts itself before my eyes: this very island has often changed its inhabitants. To pass over older things that time has covered over, the Greeks who now live in Massilia, after leaving Phocis,3 first settled on this island; what drove them from it is uncertain, whether the unhealthy climate, or the sight of all-powerful Italy, or the harborless nature of the sea; for that the savagery of the natives was not the reason is clear from the fact that they placed themselves among the peoples of Gaul, who were then at their fiercest and most uncivilized. Then Ligurians crossed over to it, and Spaniards crossed too, as appears from the likeness of their customs: they have the same head coverings and the same kind of footwear as the Cantabrians, and certain words; for the language as a whole, through contact with Greeks and Ligurians, has departed from the native one. Then two colonies of Roman citizens were brought here, one by Marius, one by Sulla: so often has the population of this dry and thorny rock changed! In short, you will hardly find any land still inhabited by its natives; everything is mixed and grafted. One people has followed another: one coveted what another had disdained; one was driven from the place it had driven others from. So it has pleased fate that the fortune of nothing should stand always in the same place.

8 Against the change of place itself, setting aside the other disadvantages attached to exile, Varro, the most learned of the Romans, thinks this remedy enough: wherever we come, we have the same Nature to live with. Marcus Brutus thinks this enough: that those going into exile may take their virtues with them.4 Even if someone judges each of these by itself too weak to console an exile, he will admit that both together can do a great deal. For how little it is that we lose! The two finest things will follow us wherever we move: nature, which is common to all, and virtue, which is our own. This was arranged, believe me, by whoever was the shaper of the universe, whether he is a god with power over all things, or incorporeal reason, the craftsman of mighty works, or a divine spirit spread with equal tension through all things greatest and smallest, or fate and the unchangeable chain of causes linked to one another; this, I say, was arranged so that nothing but the most worthless things should fall into another’s power. Whatever is best for a man lies beyond human power; it can be neither given nor taken away. This universe, than which Nature has produced nothing greater or more beautifully ordered, and the mind, which contemplates and admires the universe and is its most magnificent part, are our own and everlasting, and will stay with us as long as we ourselves remain. Eager and upright, then, let us hurry with fearless step wherever circumstances take us; let us travel across any lands whatever: no exile can be found within the universe, for nothing within the universe is foreign to man. From anywhere alike the gaze is lifted to the sky; all things divine are the same distance from all things human. So, as long as my eyes are not drawn away from that spectacle of which they never tire, as long as I may look at the sun and the moon, may dwell on the other stars, may trace their risings and settings and intervals and the causes of their moving faster or slower; as long as I may watch so many stars twinkling through the night, some motionless, some not going out into a wide space but circling within their own track, some suddenly bursting forth, some dazzling the eye with a spread of fire as if they were falling, or flying past in a long trail with much light; as long as I am with these and mingle with heavenly things, as far as a man may; as long as I keep my mind on high, straining toward the sight of things akin to it, what does it matter to me what ground I tread?

9 “But this land is not rich in fruitful or pleasant trees; it is not watered by great or navigable rivers; it produces nothing that other peoples seek, and is barely fertile enough to support its inhabitants; no precious stone is quarried here, no veins of gold and silver are dug out.” Narrow is the mind that earthly things delight: it must be led away to those things that appear equally everywhere and shine equally everywhere. And this must be borne in mind: that these things, through false and wrongly held beliefs, stand in the way of true goods. The longer the colonnades men extend, the higher they raise their towers, the wider they stretch their streets, the deeper they dig their summer grottoes, the more massive the roofs they lift over their dining halls, the more there will be to hide the sky from them. Chance has cast you into a region where the most luxurious shelter is a hut: you are indeed small-minded and console yourself meanly if you bear it bravely because you know the hut of Romulus. Say this instead: “This humble hovel, surely, gives shelter to the virtues? It will at once be more beautiful than all temples when justice is seen there, and self-restraint, and prudence, devotion, the method of rightly apportioning every duty, the knowledge of things human and divine. No place is narrow that holds this great crowd of virtues; no exile is heavy into which one may go with this company.” Brutus, in the book he wrote on virtue, says he saw Marcellus5 in exile at Mytilene, living as happily as human nature allows, and never more eager for liberal studies than at that time. And so he adds that he felt it was rather he who was going into exile, since he was to return without him, than Marcellus who was being left in exile. O Marcellus, more fortunate at the time when he won Brutus’s approval for his exile than when he won the state’s approval for his consulship! How great a man he was, who made someone feel himself an exile because he was leaving an exile! How great a man, who brought to admiration of himself a man whom even his own Cato admired! The same Brutus says that Caesar sailed past Mytilene because he could not bear to see the man disgraced. The senate did obtain his recall by public prayers, so anxious and sorrowful that all seemed that day to share Brutus’s feelings and to be pleading not for Marcellus but for themselves, lest they be exiles if they were left without him; but he achieved much more on the day when Brutus could not bear to leave him an exile, nor Caesar to see him. For he had the testimony of both: Brutus grieved to return without Marcellus, Caesar blushed. Can you doubt that so great a man often encouraged himself in this way to bear his exile calmly? “That you are without your country is not wretched: you have so steeped yourself in learning that you know every place is a country to the wise man. And then? Was not the very man who drove you out himself without his country for ten years running? To extend the empire, no doubt; but still he was without it. Now look: Africa drags him to itself, full of the threats of a war rising again; Spain drags him, reviving the broken and shattered party; faithless Egypt drags him; in short the whole world, watching for its chance against a shaken empire. Which matter will he meet first? Against which part will he set himself? His victory will drive him through all lands. Let the nations look up to him and worship him; you, live content with Brutus as your admirer.”

10 Marcellus, then, bore his exile well, and the change of place changed nothing in his mind, though poverty went with it; and that there is no evil in poverty anyone understands who has not yet arrived at the madness of greed and luxury, which turn everything upside down. For how little is necessary to keep a man! And who can lack this if he has any virtue at all? As for me, I understand that I have lost not wealth but busyness. The body’s wants are few: it wants to keep off the cold and to quench hunger and thirst with food; whatever is craved beyond this is labor spent on vices, not needs. There is no need to search every deep, to load the belly with a slaughter of animals, or to dig shellfish out of an unknown shore of the farthest sea: may the gods and goddesses destroy those whose luxury goes beyond the bounds of an empire so envied! They want game caught beyond the Phasis to stock their pretentious kitchens, and they are not ashamed to fetch birds from the Parthians, from whom we have not yet exacted punishment. From every side they bring together everything known to a jaded palate; what a stomach weakened by delicacies can barely take in is carried from the farthest ocean; they vomit so that they may eat, they eat so that they may vomit, and the feasts they hunt out over the whole world they do not even deign to digest. If someone despises such things, how does poverty harm him? If someone craves them, poverty even does him good; for he is cured against his will, and if he does not accept remedies even under compulsion, at least for a time, while he cannot have those things, he is like a man who does not want them. Gaius Caesar,6 whom Nature seems to me to have produced to show what the greatest vices could do in the greatest fortune, spent ten million sesterces on dinner in a single day; and though everyone’s ingenuity helped him in this, he could barely find a way to turn the tribute of three provinces into one dinner. Pitiable people, whose palate is not roused except by costly foods! And it is not exceptional flavor or any sweetness to the throat that makes them costly, but rarity and the difficulty of getting them. Otherwise, if they cared to return to a sound mind, what need would there be of so many arts that serve the belly? What need of trade? Of laying waste the forests? Of searching the deep? Food lies everywhere, which Nature has set out in every place; but they pass it by as if blind, and roam through every region and cross the seas, and, though they could quiet their hunger with little, they provoke it with much. I would like to say: “Why do you launch ships? Why do you arm your hands against beasts and against men? Why do you rush about in such an uproar? Why do you pile wealth on wealth? Will you not consider how small your bodies are? Is it not madness and the last error of the mind, when you can hold so little, to want so much? You may increase your fortunes and push out your boundaries, but you will never enlarge your bodies. When business has gone well and soldiering has brought in much, when food hunted from everywhere has been gathered together, you will have nowhere to put all your provisions. Why do you seek out so many things? No doubt our ancestors were unhappy, whose virtue even now props up our vices: they prepared their food with their own hands, the ground was their bed, their roofs did not yet gleam with gold, their temples did not yet shine with gems. And so in those days men swore piously by gods of clay; those who had called on them went back to the enemy to die rather than break their word. No doubt our dictator7 lived less happily, who listened to the envoys of the Samnites while he turned the cheapest food on the hearth with his own hand, the same hand with which he had so often struck the enemy and laid the laurel in the lap of Capitoline Jupiter, than Apicius8 lived within our memory, who, in the city from which philosophers were once ordered to leave as corrupters of the young, professed the science of the cookshop and infected the age with his teaching.” His end is worth knowing. When he had thrown a hundred million sesterces into his kitchen, when he had drained at single banquets so many gifts of the emperors and the huge revenue of the Capitol, he was overwhelmed by debt and forced for the first time to look at his accounts: he calculated that he would have ten million sesterces left, and, as though he would be living in utter starvation if he lived on ten million sesterces, he ended his life with poison. How great was the luxury of a man for whom ten million sesterces was poverty! Go now and think that it is the amount of money that matters, not the state of the mind. Someone was terrified of ten million sesterces, and fled by poison what others pray for. Yet for a man of so depraved a mind that last drink was the most wholesome; it was earlier that he ate and drank poison, when he not only delighted in immense feasts but boasted of them, when he paraded his vices, when he turned the city toward his own luxury, when he enticed the young to imitate him, though they are quick to learn even without bad examples. This is what happens to those who measure riches not by reason, which has fixed limits, but by vicious habit, whose whim is boundless and beyond grasp. Nothing is enough for greed; for nature even a little is enough. So the poverty of an exile brings no hardship; for no place of exile is so barren that it is not abundantly fertile for feeding a man.

11 “But the exile will miss his clothes and his house.” These too he will miss only as far as use requires: he will lack neither roof nor covering; for the body is covered with as little as it is fed; nothing that nature made necessary for man did she make laborious. But he misses purple soaked in much shellfish dye, interwoven with gold and picked out with various colors and arts: that man is poor through his own fault, not fortune’s. Even if you restore to him whatever he has lost, you will accomplish nothing; for once restored he will lack more of what he craves than he lacked as an exile of what he had. But he misses furniture gleaming with golden vessels, silver made famous by the names of old craftsmen, bronze made precious by the madness of a few, a crowd of slaves to cramp however large a house, draft animals whose bodies are stuffed and forced to fatten, and stones from every nation: let all these be heaped up, they will never fill an insatiable mind, any more than any liquid will suffice to satisfy a man whose craving arises not from lack but from the heat of burning entrails; for that is not thirst but disease. Nor does this happen only with money or food; the same nature is found in every desire that arises not from want but from vice: whatever you heap upon it will be not the end of greed but a step. So whoever keeps himself within natural measure will not feel poverty; whoever goes beyond natural measure will be followed by poverty even in the greatest wealth. For necessities even exile is enough; for superfluities not even kingdoms are. It is the mind that makes men rich; it follows them into exile, and in the harshest wildernesses, when it has found enough to sustain the body, it overflows with its own goods and enjoys them: money has no more to do with the mind than with the immortal gods. All those things that untrained minds, too much enslaved to their bodies, look up to, marble, gold, silver, and great round polished tables, are earthly weights, which a pure mind, mindful of its own nature, cannot love, being itself light, unencumbered, and ready, whenever it is released, to spring up to the heights; meanwhile, as far as the hindrance of the limbs and this heavy burden around it allow, it surveys divine things with swift and winged thought. And so it can never be exiled, free as it is, kin to the gods, and equal to the whole universe and to all time; for its thought goes around the whole sky and is sent out into all time past and future. This poor body, the prison and chain of the mind, is tossed this way and that; on it punishments, robberies, diseases do their work; but the mind itself is sacred and eternal, and no hand can be laid on it.

12 So that you may not think that, to make light of the hardships of poverty, which no one feels as heavy unless he thinks it so, I rely only on the precepts of the wise, look first at how much greater a part of mankind is poor; you will not find them any sadder or more anxious than the rich; indeed, I wonder whether they are not happier, inasmuch as their minds are pulled in fewer directions. Let us pass on to the rich: how many are the times when they are like the poor! The baggage of travelers is cut down, and whenever the needs of a journey call for speed, the crowd of attendants is dismissed. Men on campaign, how small a part of their possessions they have with them, when military discipline forbids all luxury! Nor is it only the conditions of the times or the lack of a place that puts them on a level with the poor: they pick certain days, when they have grown weary of riches, on which they dine on the ground and, putting away their gold and silver, use earthenware. Madmen! What they long for now and then, they always fear. Oh, what a fog of mind, what ignorance of the truth ⟨…⟩9 torments them, which they imitate for pleasure! As for me, whenever I look back at the examples of old, I am ashamed to use comforts for poverty, since the luxury of our times has slid so far that the traveling allowance of exiles is greater than the inheritance of leading men once was. It is well established that Homer had one slave, Plato three, and Zeno, with whom the stern and manly wisdom of the Stoics began, none; will anyone say, then, that they lived wretchedly, without seeming to everyone, for saying so, the most wretched of men himself? Menenius Agrippa, who was the mediator of public peace between the senators and the plebs, was buried by a public collection. Atilius Regulus, while he was routing the Carthaginians in Africa, wrote to the senate that his hired man had gone off and left the farm deserted; the senate decided that it should be tended at public expense while Regulus was away. Was it not worth having no slave, to have the Roman people for his tenant farmer? Scipio’s daughters received their dowries from the treasury, because their father had left them nothing;10 it was fair, by Hercules, for the Roman people to pay tribute to Scipio once, since it was always exacting it from Carthage. O fortunate husbands of those girls, who had the Roman people for a father-in-law! Do you think those people happier whose pantomime dancers marry with a dowry of a million sesterces than Scipio, whose children received heavy bronze coin as a dowry from the senate, their guardian? Does anyone disdain poverty, when its ancestral masks are so illustrious? Is an exile indignant that he lacks something, when Scipio lacked a dowry, Regulus a hired man, Menenius a funeral, when for all of them what was lacking was supplied all the more honorably because it had been lacking? With these men as its advocates, poverty is not only safe but even in favor.

13 It may be answered: “Why do you artfully pull apart these things, which can be borne one at a time but not all together? A change of place is bearable if you only change your place; poverty is bearable if disgrace is absent, which by itself usually crushes the spirit.” Against this man, whoever tries to frighten me with a crowd of ills, I shall have to use these words: “If you have strength enough against any one part of fortune, you will have the same against all of it. Once virtue has hardened the mind, it makes it invulnerable on every side. If greed, the most violent plague of the human race, has let you go, ambition will not hold you back; if you look on your last day not as a punishment but as a law of nature, then into the breast from which you have cast out the fear of death the fear of nothing else will dare to enter; if you consider that lust was given to man not for pleasure but for propagating the race, then every other desire will pass by untouched the man whom this secret ruin, planted in our very vitals, has not violated. Reason lays low not single vices but all of them together: the victory is won once and for all.” Do you think any wise man can be moved by disgrace, a man who has placed everything in himself, who has withdrawn from the opinions of the crowd? Worse even than disgrace is a disgraceful death; yet Socrates entered prison with the same expression with which he had once, alone, brought the Thirty Tyrants to order, and he was going to take the disgrace away from the place itself; for a place in which Socrates was could not seem a prison. Who is so blind to the truth that he thinks it was a disgrace to Marcus Cato to be defeated twice, as candidate for the praetorship and for the consulship?11 The disgrace belonged to the praetorship and the consulship, which Cato would have honored. No one is despised by another unless he has first despised himself. A low and abject mind lies open to that insult; but the man who rises up against the cruelest misfortunes and overturns the ills by which others are crushed counts his very miseries as sacred fillets, since we are so made that nothing wins such great admiration from us as a man who is wretched bravely. Aristides was being led to execution at Athens;12 everyone who met him lowered his eyes and groaned, as though it was not a just man but justice itself that was being punished; yet someone was found who spat in his face. He could have taken this hard, since he knew that no one with a clean mouth would dare to do it; but he wiped his face and, smiling, said to the magistrate escorting him: “Tell that man not to yawn so rudely next time.” This was to insult insult itself. I know some people say that nothing is heavier than contempt, and that death seems to them preferable. To these I will answer that exile too is often free of all contempt: if a great man has fallen, he lies there great; he is no more despised than the ruins of sacred buildings are trodden underfoot, which the devout worship just as they did when they stood.

14 Since on my account, dearest mother, you have nothing to drive you to endless tears, it follows that it is reasons of your own that goad you. And there are two: either you are moved by the thought that you have lost some protection, or you cannot bear the longing in itself.

The first part I need only touch on lightly; for I know your heart, which loves nothing in its own but themselves. Let those mothers see to it who exercise their children’s power with a woman’s lack of restraint, who, because women may not hold office, are ambitious through their sons, who drain their sons’ inheritances and angle for them too, who wear out their sons’ eloquence by lending it to others. You have taken the greatest joy in your children’s goods and made the least use of them; you have always set a limit to our generosity while setting none to your own; while you were still under your father’s authority, you even made gifts, unasked, to your rich sons; you managed our inheritances so that you worked at them as if they were your own and kept your hands off them as if they were someone else’s; you were sparing of our influence, as though you were using what belonged to others, and from our offices nothing came to you but pleasure and expense. Your affection never looked to advantage; so you cannot miss, in a son taken from you, what you never thought concerned you while he was safe.

15 All my consolation must be turned to the point from which the true force of a mother’s grief arises: “So I am deprived of the embrace of my dearest son; I cannot enjoy the sight of him or his conversation. Where is he at whose sight I smoothed my sad face, on whom I laid down all my anxieties? Where are the talks I could never have enough of? Where are the studies, which I shared more gladly than a woman would, more intimately than a mother would? Where is his coming to meet me? Where is that boyish gladness, always, at the sight of his mother?” To these you add the very places where we rejoiced together and lived together, and, as is bound to happen, the reminders of our recent companionship, which are most effective at tormenting the mind. For Fortune contrived this too against you, cruelly: she wanted you to leave, free of care and fearing nothing of the kind, only two days before I was struck down. It was well that distance had separated us, well that an absence of some years had prepared you for this blow; you came back not to have pleasure from your son but to lose the habit of longing for him. If you had been away long before, you would have borne it more bravely, since the interval itself would have softened your longing; if you had not gone away, you would at least have had the last benefit of seeing your son two days longer. As it is, cruel fate arranged things so that you were neither present at my misfortune nor accustomed to my absence. But the harsher these things are, the greater the virtue you must summon, and the more fiercely you must engage, as with an enemy you know and have often beaten before. This blood has not flowed from an unwounded body: you have been struck through your very scars.

16 There is no reason for you to use the excuse of being a woman, to whom a right to tears has been granted that is almost unrestrained, though not unlimited; and that is why our ancestors gave women ten months for mourning their husbands, to settle the stubbornness of a woman’s grief by public decree. They did not forbid mourning, but limited it; for to be affected by endless grief when you have lost one of your dearest is foolish indulgence, and by none, inhuman hardness: the best balance between devotion and reason is both to feel longing and to suppress it. There is no reason for you to look at certain women whose sorrow, once taken up, ended only with death (you know some who, after losing their sons, never put off the mourning clothes they had put on): a life braver from the start demands more of you; the excuse of being a woman cannot apply to one from whom all women’s vices have been absent. Unchastity, the greatest evil of the age, has not drawn you into the number of the many; jewels have not swayed you, nor pearls; riches have not shone before you as the greatest good of the human race; you were well brought up in an old-fashioned and strict house, and the imitation of worse women, dangerous even to the virtuous, did not turn you aside; you were never ashamed of your fertility, as though it reproached you with your age; you never, like other women whose whole appeal is sought in their looks, hid your swelling belly as an unbecoming burden, nor crushed the hope of children conceived within you; you did not defile your face with paints and cosmetics; you never liked a dress that would show nothing more when it was taken off. Modesty has seemed to you your one ornament, the loveliest beauty and one no age can touch, your greatest glory. So you cannot hold up the name of woman as a claim to keep your grief, a name from which your virtues have set you apart; you ought to keep as far from women’s tears as from their vices. Not even women will let you waste away from your wound; they will tell you to get through your necessary mourning quickly and lightly and to rise up, if only you are willing to look at those women whom conspicuous virtue has placed among great men. Fortune had reduced Cornelia from twelve children to two: if you wanted to count Cornelia’s funerals, she had lost ten; if to weigh them, she had lost the Gracchi.13 Yet when those around her were weeping and cursing her fate, she forbade them to accuse fortune, which had given her the Gracchi as sons. From this woman was bound to be born the man who said in the assembly: “Would you speak ill of my mother, who bore me?” The mother’s words seem to me far more spirited: the son set a high value on the birth of the Gracchi, the mother on their funerals too. Rutilia followed her son Cotta into exile,14 and was so bound up in her affection that she preferred to suffer exile rather than longing, and did not return to her country until she returned with her son. When he had come home and was flourishing in public life, she lost him as bravely as she had followed him, and no one saw her tears after she had buried her son. When he was banished she showed virtue; when he was lost, prudence; for nothing deterred her from devotion, and nothing kept her in superfluous and foolish sorrow. With these women I want you to be counted; you have always imitated their lives, and you will do best to follow their example in checking and suppressing grief.

17 I know that this is not in our power, and that no passion is obedient, least of all the one that arises from grief; for it is fierce and stubborn against every remedy. Sometimes we want to bury it and swallow our groans; yet tears pour down through the very face we have composed and feigned. Sometimes we occupy the mind with games or gladiators; but in the midst of the very shows that divert it, some slight reminder of its loss undermines it. So it is better to conquer grief than to cheat it; for grief that has been tricked and drawn away by pleasures or occupations rises again, and in its very rest gathers force to rage; but grief that has yielded to reason is laid to rest forever. So I am not going to show you the means I know many have used: to keep yourself occupied with a long journey or amuse yourself with a pleasant one, to spend much time in careful checking of accounts and in managing your estate, to entangle yourself always in some new business. All these help for a brief moment and are not remedies for grief but hindrances; and I would rather it ended than were deceived. So I lead you to the place where all who flee from fortune must take refuge, to liberal studies: they will heal your wound, they will root out all your sorrow. Even if you had never been used to them, you would have to use them now; but as far as my father’s old-fashioned strictness allowed you, you have, if not mastered all the liberal arts, at least touched on them. If only my father, the best of men, had been less devoted to the custom of our ancestors and had wished you to be thoroughly taught the precepts of wisdom rather than given a taste of them! You would not now have to procure help against fortune, only to bring it out. Because of those women who use learning not for wisdom but to fit themselves out for luxury, he allowed you less indulgence in study. Yet thanks to your quick mind you drank in more than the time allowed; the foundations of every discipline have been laid. Go back to them now; they will keep you safe. They will console you, they will delight you; if they have entered your mind in good faith, never again will grief enter, never anxiety, never the superfluous torment of useless distress. Your breast will be open to none of these; for it has long been closed to the other vices. These are the surest defenses, and the only ones that can rescue you from fortune.

18 But since, until you reach that harbor which your studies promise you, you need supports to lean on, I want meanwhile to show you your own comforts. Look at my brothers:15 while they are safe, you have no right to accuse fortune. In each you have something to delight you through a different kind of virtue: one has won offices by hard work, the other has wisely despised them. Find rest in the rank of one son, in the quiet of the other, in the devotion of both. I know the inmost feelings of my brothers: one cultivates his rank in order to be an ornament to you, the other has withdrawn into a tranquil and quiet life in order to have time for you. Fortune has arranged your children well, both for your help and for your delight: you can be protected by the rank of one and enjoy the leisure of the other. They will compete in their attentions to you, and the loss of one will be made up by the devotion of two. I can boldly promise: you will lack nothing but the number.

From them look also to your grandchildren: to Marcus, a most charming boy, at the sight of whom no sorrow can last; nothing so great, nothing so fresh rages in anyone’s breast that his embraces cannot soothe it. Whose tears would his cheerfulness not stop? Whose mind, tight with anxiety, would his clever prattle not loosen? Whom will that playfulness not call out to jokes? Whom, however lost in his thoughts, will that chatter, which no one will ever tire of, not turn toward itself and draw away? I pray the gods that it may be our lot to have him outlive us! Let all the cruelty of the fates be wearied and stop with me; whatever the mother had to grieve over, let it have passed to me, whatever the grandmother, to me. Let the rest of the family flourish as it is: I will make no complaint of my childlessness, none of my condition, if only I may be the expiatory offering for a house that will grieve no more. Hold close in your lap Novatilla, who will soon give you great-grandchildren, whom I had so taken over and so enrolled as my own that in losing me she may seem an orphan, though her father is alive; love her for me too. Fortune lately took away her mother: your devotion can see to it that she only grieves at having lost her mother, and does not also feel it. Now shape her character, now mold it: precepts sink deeper that are stamped on tender years. Let her grow used to your conversation, let her be formed to your judgment; you will give her much, even if you give her nothing but your example. This sacred duty will serve you as a remedy; for nothing can turn a mind that grieves out of devotion away from anxiety except reason or honorable occupation.

I would count your father too among your great comforts, if he were not away. Now, however, judge from your own affection what his is for you: you will understand how much more right it is for you to be kept for him than spent on me. Whenever the excessive force of grief assails you and orders you to follow it, think of your father. By giving him so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren you have indeed made yourself not his only one; yet the crowning of a life happily lived rests on you. While he lives, it is wrong for you to complain that you have lived.

19 Until now I had said nothing of your greatest comfort, your sister, that heart most faithful to you, into which all your cares pass to be held in common, that mind which is a mother’s to all of us. With her you have mingled your tears; in her lap you first drew breath again. She always shares your feelings, it is true; but in my case she grieves not only for you. It was in her arms that I was carried to the city; it was through her loving and motherly nursing that I recovered from a long illness; she stretched her influence for my quaestorship and, though she could not bear the boldness even of conversation or of a loud greeting, for my sake her affection overcame her shyness. Neither her retired way of life, nor her modesty, which looked countrified amid so much forwardness among women, nor her quiet, nor her private habits given to leisure kept her from becoming even ambitious for me. This, dearest mother, is the comfort by which you may be restored: join yourself to her as closely as you can, bind yourself in her tightest embraces. The grieving tend to flee what they love most and to seek freedom for their grief: you, whatever you are thinking, take yourself to her; whether you want to keep this state of mind or lay it aside, with her you will find either an end to your grief or a companion in it. But if I know the prudence of this most perfect woman, she will not let you be consumed by a sorrow that will do no good, and she will tell you her own example, which I too witnessed.

She had lost her dearest husband, our uncle, whom she had married as a girl, and lost him on the voyage itself; yet she bore grief and fear at the same time, and when the storms had been overcome, shipwrecked as she was, she carried his body ashore. Oh, how many women’s noble deeds lie in obscurity! If she had been granted that simple antiquity which was so ready to admire virtues, with what a contest of talents would the wife be celebrated who, forgetting her weakness, forgetting the sea, which even the bravest fear, exposed her own life to danger for a burial, and, while she thought of her husband’s funeral, feared nothing for her own! The woman who gave herself as a substitute for her husband is made famous by the poems of all: this is more, to seek a tomb for one’s husband at the risk of one’s life; that love is greater which, at an equal risk, buys back less.

After this, let no one wonder that during the sixteen years in which her husband governed Egypt16 she was never seen in public, admitted no provincial into her house, asked nothing of her husband, and allowed nothing to be asked of herself. And so the province, talkative and clever at insulting its prefects, in which even those who avoided wrongdoing did not escape ill repute, looked up to her as a unique example of purity, and, what is hardest for a people that enjoys even dangerous wit, held back all license of words, and to this day always wishes, though it never hopes, for another like her. It would have been much if the province had approved of her for sixteen years; it is more that it never knew her. I do not tell these things in order to go through her praises, which one cuts short by running over them so sparingly, but so that you may understand that she is a woman of a great mind, whom neither ambition nor greed, the companions and plagues of all power, overcame, and whom the fear of death did not deter, when the ship was already disabled and she was watching her own shipwreck, from clinging to her dead husband and seeking not how she might get out of it but how she might carry him out. You must show a virtue equal to hers, recover your mind from mourning, and see to it that no one thinks you regret having borne children.

20 But since, whatever you do, your thoughts must keep running back to me, and none of your children is now more often before your eyes, not because they are less dear but because it is natural to put one’s hand more often to the place that hurts, hear how you are to think of me: glad and eager, as if in the best of circumstances. And they are the best, since my mind, free of every occupation, has time for its own work, and now delights itself with lighter studies, now, eager for truth, rises up to consider its own nature and the nature of the universe. It inquires first into the lands and where they lie, then into the condition of the surrounding sea and its alternating ebb and flow; then it looks into whatever lies between heaven and earth, full of terror, this space made turbulent by thunder, lightning, blasts of wind, and the falling of rain, snow, and hail; then, having traveled through the lower regions, it bursts through to the highest and enjoys the most beautiful spectacle of divine things, and, mindful of its own eternity, it goes into all that has been and all that will be, through all the ages.

Notes

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

  2. 2. Legendary founders: the Trojan Antenor of Padua, the Arcadian Evander of a town on the site of Rome; the Greek hero Diomedes was said to have settled in southern Italy. The exile who founded Rome’s empire is the Trojan Aeneas.

  3. 3. The founders of Massilia (Marseille) came from Phocaea in Asia Minor, not from Phocis in Greece; they had earlier settled at Alalia on Corsica.

  4. 4. Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), the scholar; Marcus Junius Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, who wrote a treatise On Virtue.

  5. 5. Marcus Claudius Marcellus, consul in 51 BC and an enemy of Caesar, lived in exile at Mytilene after Pharsalus; Caesar pardoned him in 46 BC, and he was murdered on his way home.

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

  7. 7. Manius Curius Dentatus, conqueror of the Samnites; he was consul, not dictator.

  8. 8. Marcus Gavius Apicius, a famous gourmet of the reign of Tiberius.

  9. 9. The text is damaged here.

  10. 10. Menenius Agrippa, consul in 503 BC, reconciled the plebs with the senate during their secession. Marcus Atilius Regulus commanded in Africa in 256–255 BC, during the First Punic War. The Scipio is Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Calvus, killed in Spain in 211 BC.

  11. 11. Cato the Younger was defeated for the praetorship in 55 BC and for the consulship in 52 BC.

  12. 12. Aristides “the Just” was ostracized from Athens, not executed; the story is told elsewhere of Phocion, executed in 318 BC.

  13. 13. Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus and mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, the reforming tribunes killed in 133 and 121 BC.

  14. 14. Gaius Aurelius Cotta, exiled in 90 BC, returned in 82 and was consul in 75 BC.

  15. 15. Seneca’s elder brother Novatus, later called Gallio after his adoption, and his younger brother Mela, father of the poet Lucan. Marcus is probably Lucan; Novatilla is the daughter of Novatus.

  16. 16. Gaius Galerius, prefect of Egypt from AD 16 to 31.