Consolation to Helvia

Often already, dearest mother, I have felt the impulse to console you, and as often I have checked it. Many things urged me to dare it. First, I thought I would be laying aside all my own troubles once I had at least wiped away your tears for a while, even if I could not stop them altogether; then I did not doubt that I would have more authority to rouse you up if I had first risen up myself; and besides, I feared that Fortune, though vanquished by me, might yet vanquish someone of mine. And so, with my hand pressed over my own wound, I was trying as best I could to creep toward you to bind up your wounds.

But there were, in turn, things that held this purpose of mine back. I knew that your grief, while it was still fresh and raging, must not be confronted, lest the very consolations chafe and inflame it; for in sicknesses too nothing is more ruinous than medicine applied too soon. So I kept waiting until your grief should of itself break its own force and, softened by delay into bearing remedies, should suffer itself to be touched and handled. Moreover, when I unrolled all the records of the most distinguished minds, composed for the checking and the mastering of sorrows, I could find no instance of a man who had consoled his own when he himself was being mourned by them.

And so in a situation without precedent I hesitated, and I feared that this would be no consolation but a fresh tearing-open of the wound. Consider too: a man lifting his head, to console his own, from the very funeral pyre had need of new words, not such as are drawn from common, everyday address. But every greatness of grief that passes all measure must of necessity rob a man of the choice of his words, since often it chokes the very voice.

Yet I will make the attempt as best I can—not from confidence in my talent, but because, being myself the consoler, I can stand in place of the most effective consolation. You who would deny me nothing, you will surely not deny me this, I hope: that, though all mourning is stubborn, you will be willing to have a limit set by me to your longing.

See how much I have promised myself from your indulgence. I do not doubt that I shall prove more powerful with you than your grief, than which nothing is more powerful over the wretched. And so, that I may not engage it at once, I will first take its side and bring forward what may rouse it; I will lay bare and tear open all the wounds that have already closed over.

Someone will say: "What kind of consoling is this, to recall mishaps long blotted out, and to set the mind, before the very face of all its troubles, when it can scarcely endure even one?" But let him reflect that whatever ills are so deadly that they have grown strong against the remedy are for the most part cured by their opposites. Therefore I will bring to her every grief of hers, every sign of mourning; this will be to heal not by the gentle method, but by cautery and the knife. What shall I gain by it? That a mind which has conquered so many miseries should be ashamed to take hard the single wound in a body already so scarred.

So let those weep longer and groan, whose pampered minds long good fortune has unnerved, and who collapse at the stirrings of the lightest injuries; but let those whose every year has passed amid calamities bear even the heaviest blows with a brave and unshaken steadfastness. Unceasing misfortune has this one good in it: that those whom it ever harasses, in the end it hardens.

Fortune has granted you no exemption from the heaviest griefs; she did not even pass over the day of your birth. You lost your mother the moment you were born—indeed, while you were being born—and you were in a manner cast out upon the threshold of life. You grew up under a stepmother, whom by every obedience and devotion, as much as can be shown even in a daughter, you compelled to become a mother to you; yet even a good stepmother has cost no one little. Your uncle, most loving, a man of the highest excellence and courage, you lost while you were awaiting his arrival; and, that Fortune might not lighten her cruelty by spreading it out, within thirty days you buried that dearest husband by whom you had become the mother of three children.

This grief was announced to you while you were already mourning, and with all your children absent—as though your misfortunes had been deliberately gathered into that one time, so that there should be nowhere for your sorrow to lean. I pass over the many perils, the many fears, which you endured as they assailed you without respite. Just now, into that same bosom from which you had sent forth three grandsons, you received back the bones of three grandsons; within twenty days of having buried my son, dead in your arms and amid your kisses, you heard that I had been snatched away. This alone had still been wanting to you: to mourn the living.

Of all the blows that have ever come down upon your body, this latest wound is the gravest—I admit it; it has not broken the outer skin, it has cleft the breast and the very vitals. But just as raw recruits, slightly wounded, nonetheless cry out and dread the surgeon's hands more than the steel, while veterans, however deeply pierced, patiently and without a groan suffer themselves to be cleansed as though their bodies were another's, so you now ought bravely to offer yourself to the cure.

Away, then, with lamentations and wailings and all the other display by which a woman's grief commonly makes its uproar; for you have wasted all these misfortunes if you have not yet learned to be wretched. Do I seem to you to have dealt with you without timidity? I have withdrawn nothing from your store of ills, but have set them all, heaped up, before you.

I have done this with great resolve; for I have determined to conquer your grief, not to circumscribe it. And I shall conquer it, I think, first if I show that I am suffering nothing on account of which I can myself be called wretched, much less anything that should make wretched even those whom I touch; and then if I turn to you and prove that not even your fortune, which depends wholly upon mine, is grievous.

This I will tackle first, since your devotion is eager to hear it: that no ill has befallen me. If I can, I will make it plain that the very circumstances by which you think me crushed are not unbearable; but if that cannot be believed, then I shall at least be the better pleased with myself, in that I am happy amid the very things that are wont to make men wretched.

There is no reason for you to believe others about me; I myself declare to you, that you may not be troubled by uncertain reports, that I am not wretched. And I will add, to make you yet more secure, that I cannot even be made wretched.

We have been born under a good condition, if only we do not abandon it. Nature's design was that there should be no need of great equipment for living well: every man can make himself happy. External things carry little weight, and have no great power in either direction. Prosperity does not exalt the wise man, nor does adversity cast him down; for he has always striven to rest as much as possible upon himself, to seek all his joy from himself. What then?

Do I call myself a wise man? By no means; for if indeed I could profess that, I would not only deny that I am wretched, but would proclaim myself the most fortunate of all men and one brought near to god. As it is—what is enough to relieve all miseries—I have given myself to wise men, and, not yet strong enough to be my own help, I have taken refuge in another's camp, the camp, that is, of those who easily guard both themselves and their own.

They have bidden me stand unremittingly, like one posted on guard, and to foresee all the assaults of Fortune, all her onsets, long before they fall. To those she is grievous to whom she comes suddenly; he bears her easily who always expects her. For the coming of an enemy too lays low those whom it has caught unawares; but those who have prepared themselves for the coming war before the war, drawn up and arrayed, easily withstand the first shock, which is the most tumultuous.

Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be keeping the peace; all those gifts she most indulgently bestowed on me—money, honours, influence—I stored in a place from which she could take them back without disturbing me. I kept a wide space between them and myself; and so she has carried them off, not torn them away. No man has been crushed by adverse Fortune unless he was first deceived by her favouring.

Those who have loved her gifts as their own and lasting, who have wished to be admired on their account, lie prostrate and mourn when those empty, childish minds, ignorant of every solid pleasure, are deserted by their false and shifting delights; but the man who has not been puffed up by glad circumstances is not shrunk by their change. Against either condition he holds a mind unconquered, of a firmness already tested; for in the midst of prosperity itself he has proved what strength he would have against adversity.

And so I have always judged that in those things which all men crave there is no true good, and I have found them empty, smeared over with a showy and deceptive gloss, with nothing within to match their surface. And now, in these things that are called evils, I find nothing so terrible and harsh as the opinion of the crowd threatened. The very word, indeed, by a kind of persuasion and common agreement, now comes harshly to the ears and strikes the hearers as something grim and accursed. For so the people has decreed; but the people's decrees the wise for the most part repeal.

Setting aside, then, the verdict of the many, who are carried away by the first appearance of things, however it has been credited, let us see what exile is. Plainly, a change of place. That I may not seem to narrow its force and to withdraw whatever worst it has in it—this change of place is attended by these mishaps: poverty, disgrace, contempt. Against these I will contend later; for the moment I wish first to examine what bitterness the mere change of place brings.

"To be deprived of one's country is unbearable." Look, then, at this throng, for whom the roofs of the boundless city scarcely suffice: the greater part of that crowd is without a country. From their towns and colonies, from the whole world in short, they have streamed together. Some ambition has brought, some the necessity of public office, some an embassy laid upon them, some luxury seeking a place convenient and rich for its vices, some the desire of liberal studies, some the public shows; some friendship has drawn, some industry that has found ample scope for displaying its worth; some have brought their beauty for sale, some their eloquence for sale—

there is no class of men that has not flocked together into the city that sets a great price both on virtues and on vices. Order all those men to be summoned by name and ask of each "from what home" he is. You will see that the greater part are those who, leaving their own abodes, have come into a city that is indeed the greatest and fairest, yet not their own.

Then leave this state, which may be called the common one as it were, and go round all the cities; there is not one that does not have a large part of its population foreign. Pass on from those whose pleasant situation and convenient region draw the more; survey the deserts and the most rugged islands—Sciathus and Seriphus, Gyara and Cossura: you will find no place of exile in which someone does not linger of his own choice.

What can be found so bare, what so cut off on every side, as this rock? What more barren, if you look to its resources? What more savage, if you look to its men? What more forbidding, if you look to the very lie of the land? What more intemperate, if you look to the nature of its climate? Yet here more strangers than citizens take up their abode. So far, then, is the mere change of place from being grievous, that even this place has drawn certain men away from their country.

I find some who say that there is implanted in our minds a kind of natural restlessness for changing our seats and shifting our dwellings; for to man has been given a mind that is mobile and unquiet, that nowhere keeps still, that scatters itself and sends its thoughts abroad into all things known and unknown, roaming, impatient of repose, and most delighted with the newness of things.

And at this you will not wonder, if you look back to its first origin. It is not compounded of earthly and heavy matter; it has come down from that celestial spirit; and the nature of celestial things is ever in motion, fleeing and driven on with the swiftest course. Look at the stars that light up the world: not one of them stands still. The sun glides on unceasingly and changes place for place, and, though it turns with the universe, is none the less borne in the contrary direction to the world itself; it runs through all the regions of the zodiac and never halts; its motion is perpetual, its passage from one place to another unending.

All things are ever revolving and in transit; as the law and necessity of nature has ordained, they are carried from one place to another; when through fixed spaces of years they have run out their orbits, they will go again by the ways they had come. Go now and suppose that the human mind, composed of the same seeds of which divine things are made, takes ill its passage and migration—when the divine nature finds either its delight or its preservation in unceasing and most rapid change.

Come now, turn from the heavens to human affairs; you will see that whole races and peoples have changed their abode. What mean the Greek cities in the midst of barbarian lands? Why the Macedonian tongue among the Indians and Persians? Scythia and that whole stretch of wild and untamed peoples displays the cities of Achaia planted on the shores of Pontus; neither the savagery of unbroken winter nor the temper of men, as forbidding as their own climate, has stood in the way of those who carried their homes thither. There is an Athenian throng in Asia;

Miletus has poured out into divers regions the population of seventy-five cities; the whole flank of Italy that is washed by the lower sea was once Greater Greece. Asia claims the Tuscans for her own; Tyrians inhabit Africa, Carthaginians Spain; Greeks have thrust themselves into Gaul, Gauls into Greece; the Pyrenees did not check the passage of the Germans—

through trackless places, through the unknown, human fickleness has made its way. They dragged with them their children and wives and parents heavy with age. Some, tossed by long wandering, did not choose their place by judgement, but in weariness seized the nearest; others made themselves a right by arms in a foreign land; certain peoples, while they sought the unknown, the sea swallowed up; certain settled there where the want of all things had set them down.

Nor was the cause one and the same for all in leaving and in seeking a country. Some the destruction of their cities, when they had escaped the enemy's arms, drove out, stripped of their own, into the lands of others; some domestic discord dislodged; some the overcrowding of an overflowing population sent forth, to relieve its strength; some pestilence, or frequent gaping of the earth, or some intolerable defects of an unhappy soil, cast out; some the fame of a fertile coast, praised beyond its worth, corrupted. One cause has roused some, another others, from their homes;

but this at all events is plain, that nothing has remained in the same place where it was begotten. The roaming of the human race is unceasing; every day something changes in so vast a world. New foundations of cities are laid; new names of nations arise, while the former are extinguished or merged in addition to a stronger. But all these transplantings of peoples—what else are they than public exiles? Why do I drag you round so long a circuit?

What use is it to recount Antenor, the founder of Patavium, and Evander setting the kingdoms of the Arcadians on the bank of the Tiber? What of Diomedes and the others whom the Trojan War, conquered and conquerors alike, scattered through foreign lands?

The Roman empire, indeed, looks back to an exile as its founder—a fugitive whom, when his country was taken, dragging along a scanty remnant, necessity and the fear of the victor brought, as he sought distant regions, into Italy. And then how many colonies this people has sent into every province! Wherever the Roman has conquered, he dwells. To this change of place men freely gave their names, and, leaving their own altars, the old man followed the colonists across the seas.

The matter, indeed, does not call for the recounting of more instances; yet one I will add, which thrusts itself upon the sight. This very island has already often changed its inhabitants. To pass over the older changes which antiquity has covered over: the Greeks who now dwell at Massilia, having left Phocis, first settled in this island; what drove them from it is uncertain—whether the heaviness of the climate, or the sight of all-powerful Italy, or the nature of a harbourless sea; for that the fierceness of the neighbours was not the cause is plain from this, that they planted themselves precisely then amid the wildest and most untamed peoples of Gaul.

Then the Ligurians passed over into it, and the Spaniards passed over too, as is plain from the likeness of their customs; for they have the same head-coverings and the same kind of footgear as the Cantabrians, and certain words; for their whole speech, through intercourse with Greeks and Ligurians, has fallen away from the ancestral tongue. Then two colonies of Roman citizens were led out, one by Marius, the other by Sulla; so often has the population of this arid and thorny rock been changed!

Scarcely, in fine, will you find any land that even now the natives inhabit; all is mingled and grafted in. One has succeeded another; this man has coveted what was loathsome to that; that man has been cast out from where he had himself driven another. So it has pleased Fate that the fortune of nothing should stand ever in the same place.

Against the change of place itself, the other mishaps that cling to exile being stripped away, Varro, the most learned of the Romans, thinks this remedy enough: that, wherever we come, we must make use of the same nature of things. Marcus Brutus thinks this enough: that those going into exile are permitted to carry their virtues with them.

Even if anyone judges each of these too little effective for consoling an exile, he will confess that the two, brought together into one, can do very much. For how little it is that we have lost! Two things, which are the fairest of all, will follow us wherever we move: the common nature and our own virtue.

This was brought about, believe me, by whoever was the maker of the universe—whether he be a god, master of all things, or incorporeal reason, the artificer of mighty works, or a divine spirit diffused through all things great and least with equal intentness, or fate and an unchangeable chain of causes cohering one with another—this, I say, was brought about, that nothing should fall under another's control save the meanest things.

Whatever is best for man lies beyond human power; it can neither be given nor snatched away. This world, than which Nature has begotten nothing greater or more adorned, and the mind that beholds and admires the world, its own most magnificent portion, are our own, and abiding, and destined to remain with us as long as we ourselves shall remain.

Eager, then, and erect, let us hasten with undaunted step wherever circumstance shall bear us; let us traverse whatever lands. No exile can be found within the world; for nothing that is within the world is foreign to man. From wherever our gaze is lifted equally toward heaven, the divine is parted from the human by equal distances.

And so, provided my eyes be not led away from that spectacle of which they are insatiable, provided I be allowed to gaze upon the sun and moon, to cling to the other stars, to investigate their risings and settings and their intervals and the causes of their swifter or slower journeying, to watch the many stars glittering through the night—some fixed, others ranging over no great space but circling within their own track, some bursting out suddenly, some dazzling the eye with a stream of fire as though they were falling, or flying past in a long trail with much light—provided I be among these and, so far as is permitted to man, mingle with the heavenly things, provided I keep my mind, as it strains toward the sight of its kindred things, ever on high—what does it matter to me what ground I tread?

"But this land is not fruitful in trees that bear or that gladden; it is watered by no great or navigable river-channels; it produces nothing that other nations seek, scarcely fertile enough for the protection of its inhabitants; no precious stone is quarried here, no veins of gold and silver are dug out."

Narrow is the mind that is delighted by earthly things; it must be led away to those things that everywhere appear alike, everywhere shine alike. And this too must be considered: that these earthly things, through false and wrongly held beliefs, stand in the way of true goods. The longer men extend their colonnades, the higher they raise their towers, the wider they spread their walks, the deeper they sink their summer grottoes, the more massive the roofs of their banqueting-halls they rear aloft—so much the more will there be to hide the sky from them.

Chance has cast you out into a region in which the most sumptuous dwelling is a hut; but truly you are of a petty spirit and consoling yourself meanly, if you bear this bravely only because you know the hut of Romulus. Say this rather: "Does this lowly hovel surely give room to virtues? It will soon be more beautiful than all temples, when in it justice shall be beheld, and self-control, and prudence, devotion, the right ordering of all duties, and the knowledge of things human and divine. No place is narrow that can hold this throng of virtues so great; no exile is grievous into which one may go with such company."

Brutus, in the book which he composed On Virtue, says that he saw Marcellus in exile at Mytilene, living—so far as the nature of man permitted—most happily, and never more eager for the liberal arts than at that time. And so he adds that it seemed to him that he himself was rather going into exile, since he was to return without Marcellus, than that Marcellus was being left in exile.

O more fortunate was Marcellus at the time when he won Brutus' approval for his exile than when he won the state's approval for his consulship! How great a man was he who brought it about that anyone should seem to himself an exile because he was departing from an exile! How great a man, who drew into admiration of himself one to be admired even by his own Cato!

The same Brutus says that Gaius Caesar sailed past Mytilene because he could not bear to see a man so disfigured. The senate, indeed, obtained his recall by public prayers, so anxious and sorrowful that on that day all seemed to have the mind of Brutus and to be pleading not for Marcellus but for themselves, that they might not be exiles if they were to be without him; but he attained far more on the day when Brutus could not bear to leave him an exile, and Caesar to see him. For there fell to him the testimony of both: Brutus grieved that he returned without Marcellus, Caesar blushed.

Do you doubt that that Marcellus, so great a man, often exhorted himself thus to bear his exile with an even mind: "That you lack a country is no misery. You have so steeped yourself in the disciplines that you know every place to be a country for the wise man. What is more? Has not this very man who drove you out himself been without a country for ten continuous years? For the sake, no doubt, of extending the empire; but assuredly he has been without it.

Now, behold, Africa, full of the threats of a war rising again, draws him to itself; Spain draws him, which nurses anew the broken and stricken party; faithless Egypt draws him; in short the whole world, which is intent upon the chance of a shaken empire. Which thing will he meet first? Against which part will he set himself? His own victory will drive him through all lands. Let the nations look up to him and revere him; do you live content with Brutus for your admirer!"

Well, then, did Marcellus bear his exile, and the change of place changed nothing in his mind, although poverty followed it. And that there is no evil in poverty, anyone understands who has not yet come into the madness of greed and luxury, which overturns all things. For how little it is that is necessary for the protection of a man! And to whom can this be lacking, who has but any virtue at all?

So far as concerns myself, I understand that I have lost not riches but occupations. The body's wants are slight. It wishes cold to be kept off, and hunger and thirst to be quenched with nourishment; whatever is craved beyond this is toiled for in the service of vices, not of needs. There is no necessity to ransack every deep, nor to load the belly with the slaughter of animals, nor to wrench out shellfish from the unknown shore of the farthest sea; may the gods and goddesses destroy those whose luxury overpasses the bounds of an empire so envied!

They want game taken beyond the Phasis to furnish their pretentious kitchen, and they are not ashamed to fetch birds from the Parthians, of whom we have not yet exacted the penalty. From every side they gather all things, known and unknown, for the fastidious gullet; from the farthest ocean is brought what the stomach, dissolved by dainties, can scarcely admit; they vomit that they may eat, they eat that they may vomit, and the banquets which they hunt out over the whole world they do not deign even to digest. If a man despises such things, what harm does poverty do him? If a man craves them, poverty even profits him; for he is healed against his will, and, if he does not take the remedies even under compulsion, at least meanwhile, while he cannot have them, he is like one who does not wish them.

Gaius Caesar—whom Nature seems to me to have brought forth in order to show what the highest vices could do in the highest fortune—dined on a single day at the cost of ten million sesterces; and, aided in this by the ingenuity of all, he yet scarcely found out how the tribute of three provinces might be made into a single dinner.

O pitiable men, whose palate is roused only by costly food! And it is not some surpassing savour or sweetness of the throat that makes it costly, but its rarity and the difficulty of procuring it. Otherwise, if it should please them to return to a sound mind, what need is there of so many arts in the service of the belly? Of merchandising? Of laying waste the forests? Of ransacking the deep? On every hand lie scattered the foods which Nature has set in all places; but these men pass them by as though blind, and roam through every region, cross seas, and, when they could appease their hunger at small cost, provoke it at great.

One would gladly say: "Why do you launch your ships? Why do you arm your hands both against beasts and against men? Why do you rush about with such uproar? Why do you heap riches upon riches? Will you not consider how small your bodies are? Is it not madness and the utmost wandering of the mind, when you can hold so little, to crave much? Though you increase your incomes, though you push out your boundaries, never will you enlarge your bodies. When your trade has prospered, when your soldiering has brought in much, when the foods hunted from every quarter have come together, you will have nowhere to bestow these provisions of yours.

Why do you seek out so many things? No doubt our forefathers, whose virtue even now props up our vices, were unhappy—those who prepared their food with their own hand, whose bed was the ground, whose roofs did not yet gleam with gold, whose temples did not yet glitter with gems! And so in those days men swore religiously by gods of earthenware; those who had invoked them, going forth to the enemy to die, came back rather than break faith.

No doubt that dictator of ours lived less happily, who gave audience to the envoys of the Samnites while with his own hand he turned the cheapest food on the hearth—that hand with which he had already so often smitten the enemy and had laid the laurel in the lap of Capitoline Jove—than Apicius lived within our own memory, who, in that city from which philosophers were once ordered to depart as corrupters of youth, made profession of the science of the cookshop and infected the age with his teaching." His end it is worth while to know.

When he had flung ten million sesterces into his kitchen, when he had swallowed at single carousals so many largesses of princes and the huge revenue of the Capitol, weighed down with debt, he was then for the first time compelled to look into his accounts. He reckoned that there would be left to him a million sesterces, and, as though he were about to live in the last extremity of famine if he should live on a million, he ended his life by poison.

How great was the luxury for which a million sesterces was beggary! Go now and suppose that it is the amount of one's money, not of one's mind, that matters. A man dreaded a million sesterces, and what others seek by prayer he fled from by poison! For that man, indeed, of so depraved a mind, his last draught was the most wholesome. He was eating and drinking poisons when he not only took delight in his immense banquets but gloried in them, when he paraded his vices, when he turned the city to his own luxury, when he stirred up the youth to imitation of himself—youth docile of itself even without bad examples.

These things befall those who measure their riches not by reason, whose bounds are fixed, but by vicious habit, whose caprice is boundless and beyond comprehension. To greed nothing is enough; to nature even a little is enough. The poverty of the exile, then, has no mishap in it; for no exile is so destitute that it is not abundantly fertile for the feeding of a man.

"But the exile will long for clothing and a house." These too he will long for only for use: neither shelter will be lacking to him nor covering; for the body is sheltered as cheaply as it is fed. Nothing that Nature made necessary for man did she make laborious.

But he longs for purple deeply steeped in much sea-dye, interwoven with gold and picked out with varied colours and patterns: it is not by Fortune's fault, but by his own, that such a man is poor. Even if you restore to him whatever he has lost, you will accomplish nothing; for there will be more lacking, when he is restored, to that which he craves than was lacking to the exile of that which he had.

But he longs for furniture gleaming with vessels of gold, and silver made noble by the ancient names of craftsmen, and bronze made precious by the madness of a few, and a throng of slaves that crowds even a great house, and the bodies of beasts stuffed and forced to fatten, and marbles from every nation: though all these be heaped together, never will they fill an insatiable mind, any more than any quantity of water will suffice to satisfy one whose desire springs not from want but from the fever of his burning vitals; for that is not thirst, but disease.

Nor does this happen in the matter of money or food alone. It is the same nature in every desire that is born not of want but of vice; whatever you heap upon it will not be the end of craving, but a step. He, therefore, who keeps himself within the natural measure will not feel poverty; he who exceeds the natural measure will be pursued by poverty even amid the highest riches. For what is necessary even places of exile suffice; for what is superfluous not even kingdoms.

It is the mind that makes men rich; this follows into exile and, in the most rugged solitudes, when it has found enough to sustain the body, itself abounds in its own goods and enjoys them. Money has nothing to do with the mind, any more than with the immortal gods.

All those things which untrained minds, too much enslaved to their own bodies, look up to—stones, gold, silver, and the great polished discs of tables—are earthly weights, which a mind that is pure and mindful of its own nature cannot love, itself light, unencumbered, and, whenever it shall be set free, ready to dart up to the heights; meanwhile, so far as it is permitted amid the hindrances of the limbs and this heavy burden poured about it, it surveys divine things with swift and winged thought.

And therefore it can never be in exile, free and kin to the gods and the equal of every world and every age; for its thought ranges round all the heaven and is sent forth into all past and future time. This poor little body, the prison and fetter of the mind, is tossed this way and that; upon it punishments, upon it robberies, upon it diseases are practised. But the mind itself is sacred and eternal, and upon it no hand can be laid.

Lest you think that I am only making use of the precepts of the wise to make light of the mishaps of poverty—which no one feels grievous save him who thinks it so—first look at how much the greater part of mankind is poor, and yet you will mark them in no way sadder or more anxious than the rich; nay, I rather suspect that they are the happier in proportion as their mind is drawn out toward fewer cares. Let us pass over the well-nigh destitute poor, and come to the wealthy.

How many are the occasions on which they are like the poor! The baggage of travellers is cut down, and whenever the urgency of a journey demands haste, the throng of attendants is dismissed. Soldiers on campaign—how small a part of their possessions do they keep with them, when the discipline of the camp removes all their equipment?

Nor is it only the condition of the times or the want of places that levels them with the poor; they take certain days, when a weariness of riches has already seized them, on which they dine on the ground and, gold and silver set aside, use earthenware. Madmen! this very thing which they sometimes crave, they always fear. O what darkness of mind, what ignorance of truth blinds those whom the fear of poverty harasses, while for pleasure's sake they imitate it!

For myself, indeed, as often as I have looked back to the examples of old, I am ashamed to make use of the consolations of poverty, since the luxury of the age has slid so far that the travelling-allowance of exiles is greater than once the patrimony of leading men. That Homer had one slave, Plato three, Zeno none—he with whom began the rigid and manly wisdom of the Stoics—is well enough agreed. Will anyone, then, say that they lived in misery, without himself seeming on this account the most miserable of all men?

Menenius Agrippa, who was the mediator of public concord between the patricians and the plebs, was buried with money collected by subscription. Atilius Regulus, when he was routing the Carthaginians in Africa, wrote to the senate that his hired man had departed and that his farm had been deserted by him—a farm which the senate decreed should be tended at the public charge while Regulus was away. Was it not worth so much to have no slave, that the Roman people should be his tenant?

The daughters of Scipio received their dowry from the treasury, because their father had left them nothing. It was fair, by Hercules, that the Roman people should pay tribute to Scipio once, since it always exacted it from Carthage. O fortunate husbands of the girls, to whom the Roman people stood in the place of a father-in-law! Do you think those happier whose pantomime-dancers marry with a dowry of a million sesterces, than Scipio, whose children received from the senate, their guardian, heavy bronze for a dowry?

Does anyone disdain poverty, whose images are so illustrious? Does an exile take it ill that something is lacking to him, when to Scipio there was lacking a dowry, to Regulus a hired man, to Menenius a funeral—when to all of them what was lacking was therefore the more honourably supplied because it had been lacking? With these advocates, then, poverty is not only safe but even in favour.

It may be answered: "Why do you artfully separate these things, which singly can be endured but combined cannot? A change of place is bearable, if you only change place; poverty is bearable, if disgrace be absent, which even by itself is wont to crush men's minds."

Against this man, whoever shall try to terrify me with a host of ills, I shall have to use these words: "If you have strength enough against any one part of Fortune you please, the same will avail against all. When once virtue has hardened the mind, it renders it invulnerable on every side. If greed has let you go—the most violent plague of the human race—ambition will cause you no delay; if you look upon your last day not as a punishment but as a law of nature, from the breast out of which you have cast the fear of death no fear of any other thing will dare to enter;

if you reflect that lust was given to man not for the sake of pleasure but for the propagating of the race, whomever this secret destruction, fixed in the very vitals, shall not have violated, every other craving will pass him by untouched. Reason does not lay low the vices one by one, but all together; the victory is won, once and for all, over the whole."

Do you think that any wise man can be moved by disgrace—one who has rested all things upon himself, who has withdrawn from the opinions of the crowd? More even than disgrace is a disgraceful death. Yet Socrates, with that same countenance with which he had once alone reduced the thirty tyrants to order, entered the prison, about to strip the place itself of its disgrace; for that could not seem a prison in which Socrates was.

Who is so far blinded to the beholding of truth as to think it a disgrace to Marcus Cato that he was twice rejected in his candidacy for the praetorship and the consulship? The disgrace was that of the praetorship and the consulship, which were receiving honour from Cato.

No one is despised by another unless he has first been despised by himself. Let a lowly and abject mind be open to such insult; but the man who lifts himself up against the cruellest blows and overthrows those ills by which others are crushed, holds his very miseries in the place of sacred fillets, since we are so disposed that nothing among us so wins our great admiration as a man bravely wretched.

Aristides was being led to execution at Athens; whoever met him cast down his eyes and groaned, as though punishment were being inflicted not upon a just man but upon Justice herself; yet one was found to spit in his face. He could have taken this ill, since he knew that no man of clean mouth would have dared it; but he wiped his face and, smiling, said to the magistrate who attended him: "Warn that man not to gape so foully hereafter." This was to put an affront upon affront itself.

I know that some say that nothing is more grievous than contempt, and that death seems to them preferable. To these I shall answer that exile too is often free from all contempt. If a great man has fallen, he has fallen great; he is no more despised than the ruins of sacred buildings are trodden under foot—ruins which the religious revere as much as if they were still standing.

Since on my own account, dearest mother, you have nothing to drive you to endless tears, it follows that the causes belonging to you are what goad you. Now there are two; for either this moves you, that you seem to have lost some support, or this, that you cannot bear the very longing in itself.

The first part I must touch upon lightly; for I know your mind, that it loves nothing in its own save themselves. Let those mothers see to it who exploit the power of their children with a woman's lack of self-control, who, because women may not hold office, are ambitious through their sons, who both drain and grasp at the patrimonies of their sons, who wear out their eloquence by lending it to others.

You took the greatest joy in your children's goods, but used them least; you always set a limit to our generosity, while you set none to your own; you, a daughter of the family, gave of your own accord to your wealthy sons; you managed our patrimonies as though you toiled over your own, yet kept your hands off them as though they were another's; you spared our influence as though you were using another's property, and from our honours nothing accrued to you but pleasure and expense. Never did your affection look to its own advantage; you cannot, therefore, long for in a son taken from you what you never reckoned, while he was safe, to belong to you.

To that point I must turn all my consolation, whence the true force of a mother's grief arises: "And so I am deprived of the embrace of my dearest son; I can enjoy neither the sight of him nor his conversation! Where is he, at sight of whom I relaxed my sad countenance, in whom I laid down all my anxieties? Where are the conversations of which I could never have enough? Where the studies in which I shared more gladly than a woman, more familiarly than a mother? Where that running to meet me? Where the boyish gladness ever at the sight of his mother?

"You add to these the very places of our rejoicings and our meetings together, and—as must needs be—the most effective marks of our recent intercourse for tormenting the mind. For this too Fortune contrived cruelly against you, that she willed you to depart but three days before I was struck down, free from care and fearing nothing of the kind.

"Well had distance of places parted us, well had an absence of several years prepared you for this calamity. You returned, not to take pleasure in 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, the very interval softening your longing; if you had not gone away, you would at least have had the last fruit of seeing your son two days longer. As it is, cruel fate has so contrived it that you neither shared in my fortune nor grew used to my absence."

But the harder these things are, the greater the virtue you must summon, and you must close the more fiercely with an enemy known and already often conquered. It is not from an unwounded body that this blood has flowed; you have been struck through the very scars.

There is no reason for you to use the excuse of being a woman, to whom there has been granted an almost boundless right to tears—boundless, yet not measureless; and therefore our ancestors granted to women a space of ten months for mourning their husbands, that by a public ordinance they might settle the matter of the stubbornness of a woman's grief. They did not forbid mournings, but set a limit to them; for both to be afflicted with infinite grief when you have lost one of your dearest is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman hardness. The best tempering between affection and reason is both to feel longing and to crush it.

There is no reason for you to look to certain women whose sorrow, once assumed, death alone has ended (you know some who, having lost their sons, never put off the mourning they had put on). Life, braver from the beginning, demands more of you; the excuse of womanhood cannot fall to her from whom all the vices of womanhood have been absent.

Unchastity, the greatest evil of the age, has not numbered you among the many; gems have not bent you, nor pearls; riches have not blazed upon you as though they were the greatest good of the human race; you, well brought up in an ancient and strict household, were not turned aside by the imitation of the worse, perilous even to the upright; you were never ashamed of your fruitfulness, as though it reproached you with your years; never, after the manner of other women, whose every recommendation is sought from their beauty, did you hide your swelling womb as though an unseemly burden, nor did you crush within your vitals the hopes of children there conceived; you did not defile your face with paints and cosmetics;

never did a garment please you which, when laid aside, uncovered nothing more. Your one ornament, the kind of beauty that no age can wither, your greatest glory, was held to be chastity.

You cannot, therefore, put forward in support of your grief the name of woman, from which your virtues have set you apart; you ought to be as far from women's tears as from their vices. Not even women will let you waste away over your wound, but will bid you rise up, when you have quickly discharged a necessary mourning made lighter, if only you will look upon those women whom their manifest virtue has placed among great men.

Fortune had reduced Cornelia from twelve children to two; if you wished to count Cornelia's funerals, she had lost ten, if to weigh them, she had lost the Gracchi. Yet to those who wept around her and cursed her fate she forbade to accuse Fortune, who had given her the Gracchi for sons. From this woman was fitly to be born the man who said in the assembly: "Would you speak ill of my mother, who bore me?" To me the mother's word seems far more spirited; the son set a high value on the birthdays of the Gracchi, the mother on their funerals too.

Rutilia followed her son Cotta into exile and was so bound by her devotion that she chose to suffer exile rather than the longing for him, and did not return to her country until she returned with her son. Him, when he was now restored and flourishing in the state, she lost as bravely as she had followed him, nor did anyone mark her tears after her son was buried. In his banishment she showed virtue, in his loss prudence; for both nothing deterred her from her devotion and nothing held her fast in superfluous and foolish sorrow. With these women I wish you to be numbered. Whose life you have always imitated, of these you will best follow the example in restraining and repressing your grief.

I know that the matter is not in our power, and that no passion is subservient, least of all that which is born of grief; for it is fierce and stubborn against every remedy. Sometimes we wish to overwhelm it and to swallow down our groans; yet through the very face we have composed and made tearless the tears pour forth. Sometimes we occupy the mind with games or with gladiators; but, amid the very spectacles by which it is diverted, some slight token of longing undermines it. Therefore it is better to conquer grief than to cheat it;

for he who has been beguiled and led away by pleasures or occupations rises up again, and from the very rest gathers force for raging anew. But whoever has yielded to reason is composed for ever. I am not, therefore, going to point out to you those means which I know many have used—that you should keep yourself occupied by travel, whether long or pleasant, that you should spend much time in the careful keeping of accounts, in the management of your estate, that you should always be entangling yourself in some new business. All those things avail for a brief moment, and are not remedies of grief but hindrances; I, however, would rather have it cease than be deceived.

And so I lead you to that refuge to which all who flee from Fortune must betake themselves—to liberal studies. These will heal your wound, these will pluck out all your sorrow. Even if you had never been used to them, you would now have to make use of them; but, so far as my father's old-fashioned strictness allowed, you have, though you did not grasp all the good arts, at least touched upon them. Would that my father, the best of men, less devoted to the custom of his forefathers, had wished you to be schooled in the precepts of wisdom rather than merely steeped in them! You would not now have to procure your defence against Fortune, but only to bring it forth; on account of those women who use letters not for wisdom but as an outfit for luxury, he allowed you to indulge in studies the less. Yet, thanks to your grasping mind, you have drunk in more than was to be looked for in the time; the foundations of all the disciplines have been laid. Now return to them; they will keep you safe.

They will console you, they will delight you; if they enter your mind in good faith, never again will grief enter, never anxiety, never the superfluous vexation of fruitless distress. To none of these will your breast lie open; for to the other vices it has long since been closed. These, indeed, are the surest safeguards, and the only ones that can snatch you from Fortune.

But because, while you are reaching that harbour which your studies promise you, there is need of supports on which to lean, in the meantime I wish to show you your own consolations. Look at my brothers; while they are safe, it is not lawful for you to accuse Fortune.

In both you have something to delight you, each by a different virtue. The one has won honours by industry, the other has wisely scorned them. Take rest in the dignity of one son, in the quiet of the other, in the devotion of both! I know the inmost feelings of my brothers. The one cultivates his dignity for this end, that he may be an ornament to you; the other has betaken himself to a tranquil and quiet life for this end, that he may have leisure for you. Well has Fortune disposed your children both for your support and for your delight;

you can be defended by the dignity of the one, and enjoy the leisure of the other. They will vie in their dutiful offices to you, and the longing for one will be made good by the devotion of two. I can boldly promise: nothing will be lacking to you but the number.

From these turn your gaze also to your grandchildren—to Marcus, that most winning boy, at sight of whom no sadness can hold out; nothing so great, nothing so fresh rages in anyone's breast that his embrace would not soothe it away.

Whose tears would his gladness not check? Whose mind, drawn tight with anxiety, would his prattle not loosen? Whom will that playfulness not summon to jesting? Whom will that chatter that would sate no one not turn to himself and draw away, however fixed upon his thoughts?

I pray the gods that it may be our lot to have this child survive us! Upon me let all the cruelty of the fates, wearied out, come to a halt; whatever grief was due to a mother, let it have passed into me; whatever to a grandmother, into me. Let the rest of the throng flourish in its own estate. Of my childlessness, of my own condition, I will make no complaint, if only I may have been the expiation of a household destined to grieve no more.

Hold in your lap Novatilla, who will soon give you great-grandchildren—whom I had so transferred to myself, so claimed for my own, that, in losing me, she might seem an orphan, though her father is alive; cherish her for me too! Fortune lately took her mother from her; your devotion can bring it about that she only grieves to have lost a mother, and does not also feel it.

Now shape her character, now mould it; the precepts sink deeper that are imprinted on tender years. Let her grow used to your conversation, let her be fashioned to your will; you will give her much even if you give nothing but your example. This duty, so solemn for you, will be in the place of a remedy; for nothing can turn from its anxiety a mind that grieves dutifully save either reason or honourable occupation.

I would count among your great consolations your father too, were he not away; yet now, from your own feeling toward him, reflect what his is toward you; you will understand how much juster it is that you be kept for him than be spent upon me. Whenever the immoderate force of grief assails you and bids you follow it, think of your father! To him, indeed, by giving so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, you have brought it about that you are not his only one; yet the crowning of a life happily passed turns upon you. While he lives, it is impious for you to complain that you have lived.

Thus far I had kept silent about your greatest consolation, your sister, that heart most faithful to you, into which all your cares are transferred as into a common store, that soul a mother to us all. With her you have mingled your tears, in her bosom you first drew breath again. She, indeed, always follows your feelings;

yet in my own case she grieves not for your sake alone. By her hands I was carried to Rome; by her devoted and motherly nursing I recovered through a long sickness; she stretched out her influence on behalf of my quaestorship and, she who lacked the boldness even for conversation or a clear greeting, on my behalf conquered her modesty by her affection. Nothing—her secluded way of life, her modesty amid the great wantonness of women, almost rustic, her love of quiet, her habits withdrawn and laid up for repose—nothing stood in the way of her becoming even ambitious for my sake.

This, dearest mother, is the consolation by which you may be restored. Join yourself to her as much as you can, bind yourself in her closest embraces. Mourners are wont to flee from those whom they most love and to seek freedom for their grief. Do you betake yourself to her, whatever you have resolved; whether you wish to keep this state of yours or to lay it aside, you will find in her either the end of your grief or its companion.

But if I know the wisdom of that most perfect woman, she will not suffer you to be consumed by a grief that will profit you nothing, and she will tell you her own example, of which I too was a witness. She had lost her dearest husband, our uncle, to whom she had been wedded as a maiden, on the very voyage; yet she bore at the same time both grief and fear, and, overcoming the storms, though shipwrecked she brought out his body.

O how many women's noble deeds lie in obscurity! If that simple antiquity, given to admiring virtues, had fallen to her lot, with what rivalry of talents would she be celebrated—a wife who, forgetful of her weakness, forgetful of the sea to be dreaded even by the stoutest, exposed her own head to perils for the sake of a burial, and, while she thought of her husband's funeral, feared nothing for her own! She is made famous by the songs of all, who gave herself as a substitute for her husband. It is a greater thing to seek a tomb for one's husband at the hazard of life; greater is the love that redeems less at equal peril.

After this no one wonders that, through the sixteen years in which her husband governed Egypt, she was never seen in public, admitted no provincial to her house, asked nothing of her husband, suffered nothing to be asked of herself. And so that province, talkative and ingenious in heaping insults upon its prefects, in which even those who avoided fault did not escape ill-fame, looked up to her as the one example of saintliness, and—what is most difficult for a province to which even dangerous jests are pleasing—restrained all licence of speech, and to this day always longs for one like her, though it never hopes for it. It was much, if for sixteen years the province had approved her; it is more that it did not even know her.

These things I relate not in order to set forth her praises, which to circumscribe is to run over too sparingly, but that you may understand her to be a woman of great spirit, whom neither ambition nor greed—the companions and the banes of all power—has conquered, whom the fear of death did not deter, as, with the ship now stripped, she watched her own shipwreck, from clinging to her lifeless husband and asking not how she herself might get out of it, but how she might bear him out. You ought to show a virtue equal to hers, and to recall your mind from mourning, and to act so that no one may think you regret your motherhood.

But since it must needs be that, when you have done all things, your thoughts will nonetheless ever and again run back to me, and that none of your children should now come before your mind more often—not because they are less dear, but because it is natural to put the hand more often to the place that hurts—take it that you should think of me thus: joyful and eager, as in the best of circumstances. For they are the best, since the mind, free from every occupation, has leisure for its own works, and now diverts itself with lighter studies, now, greedy for the truth, rises up to the contemplation of its own nature and of the universe.

It seeks out first the lands and their situation, then the condition of the encircling sea and its alternate ebbings and flowings. Then it surveys whatever, full of dread, lies between heaven and earth—this space made tumultuous with thunders, lightnings, the blasts of winds, and the hurling down of rain and snow and hail. Then, when it has ranged over the lower regions, it breaks through to the heights and enjoys the fairest spectacle of things divine, and, mindful of its own eternity, ranges through all that has been and all that shall be, through all the ages.