Consolation to Marcia

If I did not know, Marcia, that you have withdrawn as far from weakness of a woman's mind as from the other vices, and that your character is looked upon as a kind of model from antiquity, I would not dare to confront your grief—the grief to which even men willingly cling and lie brooding—nor would I have conceived the hope that, at so unfavourable a time, before so hostile a judge, on a charge so invidious, I could bring you to acquit Fortune. What gave me confidence was the strength of mind already proved in you, and your virtue, approved by a great trial.

It is no secret how you bore yourself in the part of daughter to your father, whom you loved no less than your children, save in this one thing, that you did not wish him to outlive you. And I am not sure you did not wish even that; for a great devotion allows itself certain things contrary to good usage. The death of your father, Aulus Cremutius Cordus, you hindered as much as you could; but after it became plain to you that, amid the satellites of Sejanus, this one escape from slavery lay open to him, you did not approve his plan, yet you yielded, beaten; you shed your tears openly and choked down your groans—you did not, however, mask them with a cheerful face; and this in an age when not to be impious was itself great devotion.

But when a change of the times gave some opportunity, you brought back into men's use the genius of your father, who had been put to death for it; you rescued him from the death that was real, and restored to the public records the books which that bravest of men had written with his own blood. You deserved well of Roman letters—a great part of them had been burned; well of posterity, to whom there will come an uncorrupted account of events, credited to its author at great cost; well of the man himself, whose memory lives and will live as long as it shall be worth anything to know the history of Rome, as long as there shall be anyone who would return to the deeds of our forefathers, as long as anyone who would know what a Roman man is, what a man unbowed when the necks of all are now subdued and forced beneath the yoke of Sejanus, what a man is who is free in mind, in spirit, and in hand.

By Heaven, the commonwealth would have suffered a great loss had you not drawn him forth from the oblivion into which he had been cast for those two fairest things, his eloquence and his freedom. He is read, he flourishes; received into the hands and the hearts of men, he fears no old age; but as for those butchers, soon their crimes too—the only thing by which they earned remembrance—will pass into silence.

This greatness of your mind forbade me to have regard to your sex, forbade me to have regard to your face, which a continuous sadness of so many years holds fixed, just as it once cast its shadow over it. And see how I do not creep up on you, nor scheme to steal anything from your feelings. I have recalled to memory ancient sorrows, and, that you might know that this wound too must be healed, I have shown you the scar of a hurt as great. Let others, then, deal gently and coax; I have resolved to do battle with your grief, and I will check those wearied, exhausted eyes which now, if you will have the truth, flow more from habit than from longing—if it can be done, with your own help toward your cure, and if not, then even against your will, though you hold fast and embrace your sorrow, which you have kept alive to survive in the place of your son. For what will be the end?

Everything has been tried in vain. The consolations of friends are spent, and the authority of great men, your kinsmen; your studies, that hereditary and paternal good, pass by deaf ears, their comfort vain and scarcely availing for a brief distraction; that very natural remedy of time, which composes even the greatest distresses, in you alone has lost its power.

The third year is now passing, and meanwhile nothing has abated from that first onset; your grief renews and strengthens itself day by day, and by now its very lingering has made for it a kind of right, and it has reached such a point that it thinks it shameful to cease. Just as all vices sink in deep unless they are crushed while they are rising, so these sorrowful, wretched feelings, raging against themselves, end by feeding at last upon their own bitterness, and grief becomes the perverse pleasure of an unhappy mind.

I could have wished, then, to undertake this cure in the earliest days. A gentler medicine might have restrained the force while it was still rising; against what is inveterate one must fight more vigorously. For the healing of wounds, too, is easy while they are fresh and bleeding; then they may be cauterized and probed to the depths and admit the fingers of those who examine them—but only once they have festered into an evil ulcer. I cannot now reach so hard a grief by indulgence or by gentleness; it must be broken.

I know that all who would admonish anyone begin with precepts and end with examples. It is expedient at times to vary this practice; for one must deal differently with different people. Reason guides some; against others must be set illustrious names and an authority that leaves the mind no freedom when it stands dazzled before what is splendid.

I will set before your eyes two examples, the greatest of your sex and of your age: of the one woman who surrendered herself to be carried away by grief, and of the other who, stricken by a like misfortune and a greater loss, nevertheless did not grant her own ills a long dominion over her, but quickly restored her mind to its proper seat.

Octavia and Livia, the one the sister, the other the wife of Augustus, had lost their sons in youth, each with sure hope of the prince to come. Octavia lost Marcellus, on whom both his uncle and his father-in-law had begun to lean, on whom the burden of empire was to rest—a youth quick of spirit, mighty in talent, yet of a frugality and self-command not to be admired but greatly, considering his years or his fortune; patient of toil, a stranger to pleasures, ready to bear whatever his uncle should choose to lay upon him, and (so to speak) to build upon him. Augustus had chosen well a foundation that would yield to no weight.

Octavia set no end, through her whole life, to her weeping and lamenting, nor admitted any words that brought some healing; she would not even allow herself to be diverted, but was intent on this one thing and fixed upon it with her whole soul. Such she was through all her life as she was at the funeral—I do not say not daring to rise up, but refusing to be lifted, counting it a second bereavement to let go of her tears. She would have no likeness of her dearest son, and no mention made to her of him. She hated all mothers, and raged most against Livia, because the happiness once promised to herself seemed to have passed over to that woman's son. Most at home with darkness and solitude, not even turning her eyes toward her brother, she rejected the poems composed to celebrate the memory of Marcellus and the other honours of letters, and closed her ears against all comfort. Withdrawn from the customary rites, and hating the very fortune of her brother's greatness that blazed too brightly around her, she buried and hid herself away. With her children and her grandchildren sitting beside her, she did not lay aside her mourning garb—to the affront of all her kin, among whom, though they were safe and well, she counted herself bereft.

Livia had lost her son Drusus, who would have been a great prince and was already a great general; he had penetrated deep into Germany and there planted the Roman standards where it was scarcely known that any Romans existed. He had died on campaign, while the very enemy attended his sickness with reverence and a mutual peace, and did not dare even to wish for what would have served their advantage. To this death, which he met for the commonwealth, was added the immense longing of the citizens, of the provinces, and of all Italy, through which, while the towns and colonies poured out to do the mournful office, the funeral procession was led all the way to the city, most like a triumph.

It had not been granted to the mother to drink in the last kisses of her son and the welcome words of his dying lips. On the long journey, as she escorted the remains of her Drusus, harrowed by so many funeral pyres blazing throughout Italy—as though she lost him as many times over—yet as soon as she laid him in the tomb, she laid aside both him and her grief at once, and grieved no more than was honourable while Caesar lived, or just while Tiberius lived. She did not cease, in the end, to keep the name of her Drusus famous, to represent him to herself everywhere, in private and in public, to speak of him most gladly and to hear of him: she lived with his memory; which no one can keep and dwell upon who has made it bitter to himself.

Choose, then, which example you think the more worthy of approval. If you wish to follow the former, you will remove yourself from the number of the living: you will turn away both from others' children and from your own, and from the very son you long for; you will meet mothers as an ill omen; you will reject honourable, permitted pleasures as ill-befitting your lot; you will linger hatefully in the light, and you will be most hostile to your own years for not hurling you swiftly down and making an end. And—what is most shameful and most foreign to a mind of yours, marked for the better part—you will show that you have no wish to live and no power to die.

But if you apply yourself, after the more moderate, gentler manner of that greatest of women, to her example, you will not be sunk in misery, nor will you waste yourself with torments; for what madness is it, in Heaven's name, to exact from oneself the penalty for one's misfortune, and to increase one's ills by fresh ones! That uprightness and modesty of character which you have kept through your whole life you will show in this matter also; for there is a certain restraint even in grieving. That young man himself, most worthy that his name and the thought of him should always make you glad, you will set in a better place if you go to meet him as he used to come, alive, to his mother—cheerful and full of joy.

Nor will I lead you to the harsher precepts, so as to bid you bear what is human after an inhuman fashion, or to dry a mother's eyes on the very day of the funeral. I will come with you before an arbiter; this will be the question between us: whether grief ought to be great or everlasting. I do not doubt that the example of Julia Augusta, whom you cultivated as a friend, will please you more; she summons you to her own counsel.

She, in the first heat of it—when the wretched are most impatient and fierce—gave access to Areus, her husband's philosopher, and confessed that this had profited her much: more than the Roman people, whom she did not wish to make sad with her sadness; more than Augustus, who, with one of his supports withdrawn, was tottering and not to be bent by the mourning of his own; more than her son Tiberius, whose devotion brought it about that, at that funeral so bitter and bewept by the nations, she felt she lacked nothing but the number. This, as I suppose, was the approach,

this the beginning that Areus made with a woman so careful a guardian of her own good name: “Until this very day, Julia—so far at least as I know, who as the constant companion of your husband have known not only what is given out to the public but all the more secret movements of your two hearts—you have taken care that there be nothing for which anyone might reproach you;

and this you have observed not only in greater matters but in the least, that you should do nothing for which you would wish to ask pardon of report, that freest judge of princes. And I think nothing finer than that those set on the highest pinnacle should grant indulgence in many things and ask it for none. So in this matter too you must keep to your own custom, and commit nothing that you would afterward wish undone, or done otherwise.

“Next I beg and implore you, do not show yourself difficult and intractable to your friends. For you cannot be unaware that all these people do not know how to bear themselves—whether to say something about Drusus in your presence or nothing—lest either the forgetting of that most illustrious young man do him a wrong, or the mention of him do a wrong to you.

When we have withdrawn and gathered by ourselves, we celebrate his deeds and words with all the admiration they deserved; in your presence there is a deep silence among us about him. So you go without the greatest pleasure, the praises of your son, which I do not doubt you would be ready to prolong through all the ages, even at the cost of your life, if the power were given you.

Therefore allow—nay, invite—conversations in which he is recounted, and lend an open ear to your son's name and memory; and do not count this a burden, in the manner of others who, in such a misfortune, think it part of the evil to hear consolations.

As it is, you have leaned wholly to the other side, and, forgetting the better things, you look upon your fortune on the side that is worse: you do not turn yourself to the company of your son and his welcome meetings, not to his sweet childish caresses, not to the advance of his studies; you fasten on that last aspect of things; and onto it—as though it were not, of itself, horrible enough—you heap whatever you can. Do not, I beg you, covet that most perverse glory, of seeming the most unhappy of women!

Consider, too, that there is nothing great in playing the brave part amid prosperous things, when life proceeds on a favourable course; even the helmsman's art a calm sea and a yielding wind do not reveal; some adversity must befall him to prove his spirit.

Therefore do not bow yourself down; rather, on the contrary, plant a firm step and bear up under whatever load has fallen upon you—terrified only at the first crash. By nothing is Fortune more affronted than by a steadfast mind.” After this he showed her the son who was still safe; he showed her, of the one she had lost, the grandsons.

It was your business that was being transacted there, Marcia; it was at your side that Areus sat; change the person—it was you he consoled. But suppose, Marcia, that more was snatched from you than any mother ever lost: I do not soothe you, nor make light of your calamity.

If fates are conquered by weeping, let us weep together; let every day pass in mourning, let a sleepless sadness consume the night; let hands be laid upon a lacerated breast and the assault be made upon the very face, and let grief, since it will profit, exercise itself in every kind of cruelty. But if the dead are called back by no lamentations, if a lot unmoved and fixed for eternity is changed by no misery, and death holds fast whatever it has carried off, then let grief cease, since it is to no purpose. Therefore let us steer ourselves, and let not that force sweep us off our course!

Shameful is the steersman of a ship from whom the waves have wrenched the helm, who has abandoned the flapping sails and given up the vessel to the storm; but he is to be praised even in shipwreck whom the sea overwhelms while he still grips the tiller and holds his ground.

“But the longing for one's own is natural.” Who denies it, so long as it is moderate? For at the parting—not only at the loss—of those most dear there is an inevitable pang, and a contraction even of the firmest minds. But there is more in what opinion adds than in what nature has imposed.

Look how violent the longings of dumb animals are, and yet how brief: the lowing of cows is heard for a day or two, and no longer is that wild and frantic galloping of mares; wild beasts, when they have tracked the footprints of their cubs and ranged the woods, when they have often returned to their plundered lairs, quench their rage within a brief span; birds, when they have shrieked loudly round their empty nests, within a moment for all that grow quiet and resume their flights; nor for any creature is the longing for its offspring long, save for man, who attends upon his own grief and is afflicted not so much as he feels, but as much as he has resolved.

And that you may know this is not natural—to be broken by grief—the same bereavement wounds women more than men, barbarians more than the men of a peaceable and cultivated nation, the unlearned more than the learned. And yet those things which take their force from nature keep that same force in all; it is plain, then, that what varies is not natural.

Fire will burn men of every age and the citizens of every city, women as well as men; iron will display its power to cut in every body. Why? Because their forces are given them by nature, which makes no distinction of persons. Poverty, grief, ambition, one man feels in one way and another in another, according as habit has stained him, and a preconceived opinion about things that are not to be feared renders him weak and impatient of the dreadful.

Next, what is natural does not diminish with delay; but a long day consumes grief. Be it ever so stubborn, rising up daily and seething against remedies, yet time, the most effective subduer of fierceness, saps its strength.

There remains in you, Marcia, even now a vast sadness, and it seems by now to have grown a callus—no longer that agitated grief such as it was at first, but obstinate and unyielding; yet this too the years will little by little take from you. Whenever you busy yourself with something else, your mind will be relaxed. As it is, you keep watch over your own self;

but there is a great difference between allowing yourself to mourn and commanding it. How much better it befits the refinement of your character to make an end of mourning rather than to wait for one, and not to await that day on which, against your will, your grief will cease! Renounce it yourself!

“Whence, then, comes to us such stubbornness in lamenting ourselves, if it is not done at nature's bidding?” From this: that we set no evil before us before it comes upon us, but, as though ourselves exempt and travelling a more peaceful road than others, we are not warned by the misfortunes of others that they are common to all.

So many funerals are led past our house: we do not think about death; so many untimely deaths: we busy our minds with the manhood of our infants, with their military service and their succession to the paternal inheritance; the sudden poverty of so many rich men falls upon our eyes: and it never comes into our mind that our own wealth, too, is set on ground just as slippery. Inevitably, then, we collapse the harder: we are struck as if out of the blue; what has been foreseen long beforehand falls upon us with less force.

Will you understand that you stand exposed to all the blows, and that the missiles which have pierced others have been brandished about you! As though you were approaching, but half-armed, some wall, or a place besieged by a great host and hard of ascent, look for a wound, and think that those stones flying from above, with the arrows and the javelins, are aimed at your body. As often as someone falls at your side or behind your back, cry out: “You will not deceive me, Fortune, nor catch me off guard or careless. I know what you are preparing; another, indeed, you have struck, but it was me you aimed at.”

Who ever looked upon his possessions as though he were about to perish? Which of us ever dared to think of exile, of want, of bereavement? Who, if he were urged to think of it, would not reject it like an ill omen, and bid those things go upon the heads of his enemies, or of the untimely warner himself? “I did not think it would happen.”

Do you think anything will not happen, when you know it can happen, when you see that it has befallen many? An excellent line, and worthy not to have come from the stage: “What can befall any man can befall everyone.” That man has lost his children; you too can lose them. That man has been condemned; your own innocence is under the blow. This error deceives us, this unmans us, while we suffer what we never foresaw that we could suffer. He robs present evils of their force who has looked ahead to future ones.

Whatever this is, Marcia, that shines about us from without—children, honours, wealth, spacious halls and forecourts crowded with a throng of clients shut out, a famous name, a noble or beautiful wife, and the rest that hangs upon an uncertain and shifting lot—these are borrowed trappings of another's. Not one of them is given as a gift. The stage is furnished with properties contributed and bound to return to their owners; some of them will be carried back on the first day, others on the second, and few will hold out to the end.

And so there is no reason for us to admire ourselves as though set among our own possessions: we have received them on loan. The use and enjoyment is ours, the term of which is fixed by that arbiter of his own gift; we ought to hold ready what has been given for an uncertain day, and, when called upon, to return it without complaint: it is the part of the worst debtor to abuse his creditor.

All our own, then—both those whom, by the law of birth, we hope to have survive us, and those whom it is their own most just prayer to go before us—we ought to love as though nothing had been promised us of their lastingness, nay, nothing even of their continuance. Again and again the mind must be reminded to love them as things that will depart—nay, as things even now departing. Whatever has been given by Fortune, possess as though its giver were withdrawn.

Snatch your pleasures from your children, give yourselves in turn to your children for their enjoyment, and without delay drain every joy; nothing is promised you for this night—I have allowed too long a respite—nothing for this hour. We must make haste; we are pressed hard from behind. Soon that company will be scattered; soon those fellowships will be dissolved, with a cry of farewell. Everything is being plundered away; wretches, you do not know how to live in flight!

If you grieve that your son is dead, the blame is of the time when he was born; for death was proclaimed to him at his birth; on this condition was he begotten, this was the fate that attended him straight from the womb.

We have come into the kingdom of Fortune, and a harsh and unconquerable one, destined at her caprice to suffer things deserved and undeserved. Upon our bodies she will work her abuse wantonly, insolently, cruelly. Some she will scorch with fire, whether applied for punishment or for remedy; others she will bind in chains, and that now an enemy may be permitted, now a fellow citizen; others, naked, she will toss upon uncertain seas, and, when they have struggled with the waves, will not so much as cast them up on the sand or the shore, but will bury them in the belly of some monstrous beast; others, wasted away by various kinds of diseases, she will keep long suspended midway between life and death. Like a mistress changeable and capricious and careless of her slaves, she will be inconstant in both her punishments and her rewards.

What need to bewail the parts? The whole of life is lamentable; new troubles will press upon us before we have made satisfaction to the old. You must therefore set a measure to yourselves—above all you who carry things to excess—and the violence of the human heart must be apportioned over its many sorrows. And then, what is this forgetfulness of your own and the common condition? You were born mortal, you have borne mortals. A rotting and fluid body yourself, and assailed by the causes of disease, did you hope that of so frail a substance you had borne anything solid and eternal?

Your son has died; that is, he has run his course to that goal toward which those whom you count more fortunate than your offspring are hastening. Toward this, with steps unequal, presses on all that crowd which litigates in the forum, looks on in the theatres, prays in the temples; and what you love and revere, and what you despise, one ash will make equal. This, surely, is what that utterance inscribed at the Pythian oracle says: KNOW THYSELF. What is man?

A vessel cracked by any shaking, broken by any toss. There is no need of a great storm to break you up; wherever you strike, you go to pieces. What is man? A weak and brittle body, naked, by its own nature unarmed, needing another's help, cast out to all the affronts of Fortune; when it has trained its muscles well, the food of any beast, the victim of any; woven of weak and fluid stuff, comely only in its outer lineaments; impatient of cold, of heat, of toil, and yet doomed by mere rest and idleness to waste away; fearing its very nourishment, by the want of which it now fails, by the abundance of which it now bursts; of an anxious and precarious keeping, with a breath that is begged and ill-clinging, which a sudden terror or a noise unexpectedly heard, grievous to the ears, shakes out of it; forever the nurse of its own disquiet, faulty and useless.

And do we marvel at death in such a creature—death that is the work of a single gasp? Is it, then, any great undertaking that it should fall? A smell to it, and a taste, and weariness and wakefulness, and moisture and food, and the very things without which it cannot live, are deadly; wherever it bestirs itself, at once conscious of its own infirmity, unable to bear every climate, made sick by changes of water and by a breath of unaccustomed air, and by the slightest causes and offences—rotten, ailing, having begun its life with weeping—while all the while what great commotions this so despised animal sets afoot! into what great thoughts it comes, forgetful of its own condition!

Immortal, eternal things it turns over in its mind, and makes provision for grandsons and great-grandsons, while, as it attempts these long designs, death overtakes it; and this thing called old age is the round of a very few years.

Your grief, if indeed it has any reason at all, does it regard its own hurts or those of the one who has died? In the loss of your son, does it move you that you took no pleasures from him, or that, had he lived longer, you might have taken greater ones? If you shall say you took none, you will make your loss the more bearable; for men long less for those things from which they have got no joy or gladness. If you shall confess that you took great pleasures, then you ought not to complain of what has been taken away, but to give thanks for what fell to your lot.

For sufficiently great fruits of your labours came to you from the very rearing of him—unless, indeed, those who with the utmost care nurse puppies and birds and trifling amusements of the mind get some pleasure from the sight and the touch and the coaxing fondness of dumb creatures, while to those who rear children the rearing itself is no fruit of their rearing. Therefore, though his industry brought you nothing, though his carefulness guarded nothing for you, though his prudence advised nothing—the very fact that you had him, that you loved him, is the fruit. “But it could have been longer, greater.”

Yet it has fared better with you than if it had not fallen to you at all; for if the choice were offered, whether it is better to be happy not for long, or never, it is better that goods, though they will depart from us, should fall to us than no goods at all. Would you rather have had some degenerate fellow, who would only fill up the number and the name of a son, or a youth of such promise as yours—early prudent, early dutiful, early a husband, early a father, early attentive to every duty, early a priest, all as though he were in haste?

Great goods, and lasting ones, fall to almost no one's lot; no happiness endures and reaches the end save a slow-growing one. The immortal gods, not meaning to give you your son for long, gave you at once such a one as can be made only over a long time. Nor can you even say that you were singled out by the gods, as one to whom it was not granted to enjoy a son. Cast your eyes round upon the whole throng of those you know and do not know: everywhere you will meet men who have suffered greater things. Great generals have felt these blows, princes have felt them; the fables have not left even the gods exempt—so that, I suppose, it might be a relief in our own bereavements that even divinities perish. Look round, I say, upon all; you will name no house so wretched that it does not find comfort in one more wretched.

By Heaven, I do not think so meanly of your character as to suppose you could bear your misfortune more lightly if I should produce for you a vast number of mourners. It is a spiteful kind of comfort, a crowd of the wretched; yet I will mention a few—not that you may learn that this commonly befalls men (for it is absurd to gather up examples of mortality), but that you may know there have been many who softened hard blows by bearing them calmly. I will begin with the most fortunate.

Lucius Sulla lost a son, and that loss neither blunted his malice and his fierce valour against enemies and citizens, nor made it appear that he had falsely usurped that surname—which he assumed after losing his son—fearing neither the hatred of men, by whose ill those too-favourable fortunes of his were upheld, nor the envy of the gods, whose reproach it was that Sulla was so fortunate. But let it pass among matters not yet judged, what manner of man Sulla was—even his enemies will admit that he took up arms well, and laid them down well. This much, of which we are treating, will stand fast: that it is not the greatest evil which reaches even the most fortunate.

Lest Greece too much admire that father who, when the death of his son was announced in the very midst of a sacrifice, only bade the flute-player be silent and took the garland from his head, but completed the rest of the rite duly—Pulvillus the pontiff brought it to pass that, as he held the doorpost and was dedicating the Capitol, the death of his son was announced to him. This he pretended not to have heard, and pronounced the solemn words of the pontifical formula, no groan breaking off the prayer, and at his son's name praying Jupiter to be gracious.

Do you think there ought to be any end to the mourning of a man whose first day and first onset of grief did not draw the father away from the public altars and from the auspicious naming of the god? By Heaven, he was worthy of that memorable dedication, worthy of the most ample priesthood, who did not cease to worship the gods even when they were angry. Yet that same man, when he returned home, both filled his eyes and uttered some tearful words, and, when he had performed what custom required to be rendered to the dead, returned to that Capitoline countenance.

Paulus, about the days of that most renowned triumph in which he drove Perses, the name of an illustrious king, in chains before his car, gave two sons in adoption, and buried the two he had kept for himself. What sort, do you think, were those he kept, when Scipio was among the ones he had lent away? Not without emotion did the Roman people look upon the empty car of Paulus. Yet he made a speech and gave thanks to the gods that he had become master of his prayer; for he had prayed that, if anything were owed to envy for so great a victory, it might be paid by his own loss rather than by the public's.

Do you see with how great a spirit he bore it? He congratulated himself on his own bereavement. And whom could so great a reversal have more deeply shaken? He lost his comforts and his supports at once. Yet it was not granted to Perses to see Paulus downcast.

Why should I now lead you through innumerable examples of great men, and seek out the wretched, as though it were not the harder task to find the happy? For how few houses have held together to the end in all their parts? In which has nothing been thrown into confusion? Take any one year you like and call up its magistrates: Lucius Bibulus, if you will, and Gaius Caesar—you will see that, between colleagues most hostile, their fortune was in accord.

The two sons of Lucius Bibulus—a better man than a braver one—were slain together, the sport of an Egyptian soldier, so that no less than the bereavement itself the author of it was a thing worthy of tears. Yet Bibulus, who through the whole year of his office had hidden at home out of resentment toward his colleague, on the very day after the double funeral was reported, came forth to the usual duties of his office. Who can give less than one day to two sons? So quickly did he end his mourning for his children, who had mourned his consulship for a year.

Gaius Caesar, while he was ranging through Britain and could not contain his good fortune within the Ocean, heard that his daughter was dead, leading the public fates along with her. Before his eyes was already Gnaeus Pompey, who would brook with no even temper that anyone else be great in the commonwealth, and would set a limit upon advances which seemed grievous to him even when they grew for the common good. Yet within three days Caesar discharged the duties of a commander, and conquered his grief as swiftly as he was wont to conquer all else.

Why should I recount to you the funerals of the other Caesars? Whom Fortune seems to me at times to violate for this very end, that even so they may profit the human race, showing that not even those who are said to be born of gods and destined to beget gods have their own fortune so in their power as another's.

The deified Augustus, having lost his children and grandchildren, the throng of the Caesars being exhausted, propped up his deserted house with an adoption; yet he bore it as bravely as one whose own cause was now at stake, and whom it most concerned that no one should complain of the gods. Tiberius

Caesar lost both the son he had begotten and the one he had adopted; yet he himself praised his son from the Rostra and stood in full view, with the body laid out, only a veil interposed to keep the eyes of the pontiff from the corpse, and, while the Roman people wept, he did not change his countenance; he gave Sejanus, standing at his side, proof of how patiently he could lose his own.

Do you see how great a supply there is of the greatest men, whom Fortune, that lays all things low, has not exempted—men in whom so many goods of the mind, so many distinctions, had been heaped up both publicly and privately? But evidently that storm goes its round and lays all waste without distinction, and drives all before it as its own. Bid each man render his account: it has been granted to none to be born with impunity.

I know what you will say: “You have forgotten that you are consoling a woman; you recount the examples of men.” But who has said that nature has dealt grudgingly with the natures of women and drawn their virtues into a narrow compass? Believe me, theirs is an equal vigour, an equal capacity for honourable things, should they so please; they endure pain and toil on equal terms, once they are accustomed to them.

In what city, good gods, do we say this? In the one in which Lucretia and Brutus cast the king off the necks of the Romans: to Brutus we owe our liberty, to Lucretia we owe Brutus; in which Cloelia, scorning both the enemy and the river, we have all but transferred, for her signal daring, to the ranks of the men: seated upon her equestrian statue on the Sacred Way, in that most frequented spot, Cloelia reproaches our young men, as they mount the cushioned litters, for entering thus in a city in which we have granted even women a horse.

But if you wish examples of women to be recounted to you, women who have bravely longed for their own, I will not go from door to door in my search; from one family I will give you two Cornelias. The first, the daughter of Scipio, the mother of the Gracchi. Twelve births she counted over again in as many funerals. As for the rest, that is easy, whom the state felt neither born nor lost; but Tiberius and Gaius—whom even one who would deny them good men will admit were great—she saw both slain and unburied. Yet to those who consoled her and called her wretched she said: “Never shall I call myself other than fortunate, who bore the Gracchi.”

Cornelia, the wife of Livius Drusus, had lost a most illustrious young man of distinguished talent, who, walking in the footsteps of the Gracchi, had been killed within his own household, with so many bills left unpassed, the author of his murder unknown. Yet both the bitter and unavenged death of her son she bore with as great a spirit as he himself had borne his laws.

Will you now be reconciled with Fortune, Marcia, if she has not even from you held back the darts which she drove into the Scipios and the mothers and daughters of the Scipios, with which she assailed the Caesars? Life is full of and beset by various misfortunes, from which there is for none a long peace, scarcely a truce. You had raised four children, Marcia. They say that no dart falls in vain that is launched into a packed column: is it any wonder that so great a throng could not pass by without envy or harm? “But Fortune

was the more unjust in this, that she not only snatched away my sons, but chose them.” Yet you would never call it an injury to share on equal terms with a more powerful partner; she has left you two daughters, and the grandsons of these. And the very one whom you most mourn, forgetting the former, she has not wholly taken from you; you have by him two daughters—if you bear it ill, great burdens; if well, great comforts. Bring yourself to this, that when you see them you may be reminded of your son, not of your grief!

When the farmer's trees have been overthrown—either torn up by the roots by the wind or snapped off by a whirlwind twisted by some sudden rush—he cherishes the offshoot remaining from them, and at once sets out seeds and slips to replace those he has lost; and in a moment (for as time is swift and rapid for losses, so it is for growth) they grow up more luxuriant than the ones lost.

These daughters of your Metilius, then, set now in his place, and fill the empty room, and lighten your one grief with a doubled comfort. It is indeed the nature of mortals that nothing pleases more than what has been lost; in our longing for what has been snatched away we are too unfair toward what is left us. But if you will reckon how greatly Fortune, even when she raged, has spared you, you will know that you have more than comforts: look upon so many grandsons, two daughters. Say this too, Marcia: “I should be moved, if everyone's fortune were according to his character, and evils never followed the good; as it is, I see that, with all distinction removed, the bad and the good are tossed about in the same way.”

“Yet it is hard to lose a young man whom you had reared, now a defence and an ornament to mother and father alike.” Who denies that it is hard? But it is human. To this you were born: to lose, to perish, to hope, to fear, to unsettle others and yourself, both to dread death and to wish for it, and—what is worst—never to know in what state you stand.

If someone should say to a man bound for Syracuse: “Learn beforehand all the discomforts, all the pleasures of your coming journey, and then so set sail. These are the things you may wonder at: you will see, first, the island itself cut off from Italy by a narrow strait, which once, it is agreed, clung to the mainland; the sea suddenly broke in there and severed the Sicilian side from the Hesperian. Then you will see (for it will be permitted you to skim past that most greedy whirlpool of the sea) that fabled Charybdis, famed in song, calm so long as it is free of the south wind, but, if anything has blown more violently from that quarter, sucking down ships with a great and deep gaping mouth.

You will see the fountain Arethusa, most celebrated in song, pouring forth its waters most cold, of a pool most clear and transparent to the bottom—whether it found those waters there first springing up, or restored, whole, a river that had glided beneath the earth and, passing under so many seas, was kept unmixed with the worse water.

You will see the most quiet of all harbours, of those which either nature has set for the safekeeping of fleets or the hand of man has assisted, so safe that not even the fury of the greatest storms finds place there. You will see the spot where the power of Athens was broken, where that natural prison, with its rocks cut to an infinite depth, had shut in so many thousands of captives—the huge city itself, and a territory broader than the bounds of many cities, the mildest of winters, and not a day without the visiting of the sun.

But when you have learned all these things, a heavy and unhealthy summer will spoil the benefits of the winter sky. There will be Dionysius the tyrant there, the ruin of liberty, of justice, of the laws, greedy of domination even after Plato, of life even after exile! Some he will burn, some he will scourge, some for a trifling offence he will order to be beheaded; he will summon to his lust males and females, and amid the foul herds of his royal intemperance it will be too little to couple two at a time. You have heard what may invite you, what may deter you; therefore either sail, or stay back.”

After this declaration, if anyone should have said he wished to enter Syracuse, could he have any just complaint against anyone but himself, who had not fallen into those troubles, but had come knowing and aware? To us all Nature says: “I deceive no one. You, if you raise sons, may have them handsome, and you may have them deformed; perhaps they will be born mute. One of them may prove as much a saviour of his country as a betrayer of it.

There is no reason to despair that they will be of such honour that, on their account, no one will dare to speak ill of you; yet set before yourself also that they may be of such infamy that they themselves become curses to you. Nothing forbids that they perform your last rites, and that you be praised by your children; but so prepare yourself as one who is about to lay upon the fire either a child or a youth or an old man; for the years are nothing to the point, since no funeral is other than untimely that a parent follows.” After these terms have been set forth, if you raise children, you free the gods from all blame, who have promised you nothing certain.

Come now, apply this image to the entrance upon life as a whole. When you were deliberating whether to visit Syracuse, I set forth whatever could delight you, whatever could offend; suppose that, at your birth, I come to give you counsel:

“You are about to enter a city shared by gods and men, embracing all things, bound by fixed and eternal laws, rolling on the untiring offices of the heavenly bodies. You will see there innumerable stars twinkle; you will see one luminary, the sun, fill all things, marking out by his daily course the spaces of day and night, and by his yearly course dividing summers and winters more evenly still. You will see the moon's nightly succession, borrowing from her meetings with her brother a soft and gentle light, now hidden, now with full face overhanging the earth, changeable in her gains and losses, never like the one just past.

You will see five stars driving on their different paths and striving against the headlong sweep of the firmament: upon their lightest motions hang the fortunes of peoples, and the greatest and the least things are shaped accordingly, as a favourable or an unfavourable star has come on. You will marvel at the gathered clouds and the falling waters and the slanting lightnings and the crash of the sky.

When, sated with the spectacle of the things above, you cast your eyes upon the earth, another aspect of things, and marvellous in another way, will receive you: on this side the spread plain of fields stretching to infinity, on that the peaks of mountains rising aloft in great and snowy ranges; the downward rush of rivers, and streams diffused from a single source toward the west and the east, and woods nodding on the highest summits, and so vast a sweep of forests with their living creatures and the discordant concert of birds;

the varied sites of cities, and nations sequestered by the difficulty of their ground, some withdrawing themselves up into steep mountains, others, timorous, spreading themselves round along banks, lakes, and valleys; the crop helped by cultivation, and the orchards wild without a tiller; the gentle running of brooks among the meadows, and pleasant bays, and shores receding into a harbour; so many islands scattered over the vast deep, which by their interposition mark off the seas.

What of the gleam of stones and gems, and the gold flowing among the sands of rushing torrents, and, in the midst of the lands and again in the midst of the sea, the airy beacons of fire, and the Ocean, the bond of the lands, cleaving the continuity of the nations with its threefold gulf and surging up with vast licence?

You will see here, in waters restless and tossing even without a wind, creatures swimming that surpass in size the land animals: some heavy and moved only by another's guidance, some swift and faster than oars driven hard, some that drink in the waves and breathe them out to the great peril of those sailing past. You will see here vessels in search of lands they have not known; you will see nothing left untried by human daring, and you will be both a spectator and yourself a great part of those that make the attempt; you will learn and you will teach arts, some to furnish life, others to adorn it, others to govern it.

But there will be there a thousand plagues of bodies and of minds, and wars and robberies and poisons and shipwrecks and disorders of the sky and of the body, and the bitter longings for those most dear, and death—uncertain whether an easy one or one through punishment and torture. Deliberate with yourself and weigh well what you wish: to reach those things, you must pass out through these.” Will you answer that you wish to live? Why not? Nay, I suppose, you will not so much as approach that from which it grieves you to have anything struck away! Live, then, as it is fitting. “No one,” you say, “consulted us.” Our parents were consulted on our behalf, who, knowing the condition of life, raised us into it.

But, to come to consolations, let us see first what must be cured, then in what way. What moves the mourner is the longing for the one he loved. That this, of itself, is bearable, is plain; for those who are absent and those who will be absent, while they live, we do not weep for, although all use of them, with the sight of them, has been snatched from us. It is opinion, then, that tortures us, and each evil is just so great as we have appraised it. We have the remedy in our own power. Let us judge them to be absent, and let us deceive our own selves: we have sent them away—nay, we have sent them ahead, being about to follow.

This too moves the mourner: “There will be no one to defend me, no one to vindicate me from contempt.” That I may use a consolation not at all plausible but true: in our state, childlessness confers more influence than it takes away, and so far does the solitude which used to undo old age now lead to power, that some feign hatred of their sons and disown their children, and make themselves childless by their own hand. I know what you will say:

“My own losses do not move me; for indeed he is not worthy of consolation who is vexed that his son has died as one is vexed at a slave, who has leisure to look in his son for anything beyond the son himself.” What, then, moves you, Marcia? Is it that your son has died, or that he did not live long? If it is that he died, you ought always to have grieved; for you always knew that he would die.

Consider that the dead are afflicted by no evils; that those things which make the lower world dreadful to us are fables; that no darkness threatens the dead, nor prison, nor rivers blazing with fire, nor a river of Forgetfulness, nor tribunals and defendants and, in that liberty so unconfined, any tyrants over again: the poets have made sport of these things and harried us with empty terrors.

Death is the release and the end of all sorrows, beyond which our ills do not pass, which restores us to that tranquillity in which we lay before we were born. If anyone pities the dead, let him pity the unborn as well. Death is neither a good nor an evil; for that can be either a good or an evil which is something; but what is itself nothing, and reduces all things to nothing, hands us over to no fortune. For evils and goods turn upon some matter. Fortune cannot hold what Nature has let go, nor can he be wretched who is nothing.

Your son has passed beyond the bounds within which there is servitude; a great and eternal peace has received him. He is not assailed by the fear of poverty, nor the care of riches, nor the goads of lust that gnaws at the mind through pleasure; he is not touched by envy of another's happiness, nor pressed by envy of his own; nor are his modest ears lashed by any revilings; no public calamity is foreseen, none private; he does not hang in anxiety about the future, dependent upon an outcome that always repays with things more uncertain. At last he has come to a stand where nothing can drive him out, where nothing can terrify.

O men ignorant of their own ills, who do not praise death as the best invention of Nature and await it—whether it shuts in happiness, or repels calamity, or sets a term to the satiety and weariness of the old man, or in its flower leads off the youthful age while better things are hoped for, or recalls childhood before its harder steps: the end for all, the remedy for many, the prayer of some, deserving better of none than of those to whom it comes before it is summoned! This dismisses servitude against the master's will; this lightens the chains of captives;

this leads out of prison those whom an unbridled authority had forbidden to go forth; this shows the exiles, who ever stretch their minds and eyes toward their homeland, that it makes no difference beneath whom one lies; this, when Fortune has ill divided the common lot and given one man, born with equal right, to another, makes all things equal; this is the thing after which no one has done anything at another's bidding; this is the thing in which no one has felt his own lowliness; this is the thing that lay open to all; this is the thing, Marcia, which your father longed for; this, I say, is the thing that brings it to pass that to be born is no torment, that brings it to pass that I do not fall before the threats of misfortune, that I can keep my mind safe and master of itself: I have something to which I may appeal.

I see there crosses, and not of one kind only, but fashioned differently by different men: some hang their victims head downward toward the ground, others drive a stake through the privy parts, others stretch out the arms upon a gibbet; I see cords, I see scourges, and for the several limbs the several engines of torture. But I see death also. There are there bloody enemies, insolent fellow citizens; but there I see death also. It is no hardship to be a slave where, if one is sick of one's mastery, it is permitted to pass at a single step to liberty. Dear to me, O life, I hold you, by the kindness of death!

Consider how great a good a timely death holds, how to many it has done harm to have lived longer. If a sickness at Naples had carried off Gnaeus Pompey, that glory and bulwark of the empire, he would have departed the undoubted chief of the Roman people. But as it was, the addition of a brief span of time cast him down from his pinnacle. He saw the legions slaughtered before his eyes, and that from that battle, in which the front line was the senate—how unhappy were the remnants!—the commander himself survived; he saw the Egyptian executioner, and yielded to a hireling a body inviolable to the conquerors; though, even had he been unharmed, he would have come to repent of his safety: for what was more shameful than that Pompey should live by the kindness of a king?

Marcus Cicero, if at that time, when he escaped the daggers of Catiline—by which he was attacked together with his country—he had fallen; if as the saviour of the freed commonwealth, if at last when he followed the funeral of his daughter, he had died—even then he could have died happy. He would not have seen swords drawn against the heads of citizens, nor the goods of the slain divided among their murderers, so that they perished even at their own cost; nor the spear selling consular spoils, nor murders contracted for at public expense, nor brigandage, wars, plunderings—so many Catilines.

Marcus Cato, if the sea had swallowed him as he returned from Cyprus and the administration of the royal inheritance, or that very money which he was bringing as a war-fund for the civil war—would it not have gone well with him? This at least he would have carried away with him: that no one would dare to do wrong in Cato's presence. As it was, the addition of a very few years drove a man born for liberty, not his own only but the public's, to flee Caesar and follow Pompey. Nothing, then, of evil did an untimely death bring upon him; it spared him the endurance even of all evils.

“Yet he died too soon, and untimely.” First, suppose he had survived—take in how far, at the very most, it is granted to a man to advance: how much is it? Brought forth for the briefest time, soon to yield our place to the one who comes, we look upon this lodging as a thing taken on agreement. Do I speak of our own life-spans, which the age rolls on with incredible swiftness? Reckon up the generations of cities; you will see how short a time even those have stood which boast of their antiquity. All human things are brief and perishable, and occupy no part of infinite time.

This earth, with its cities and peoples and rivers and the girdle of the sea, we set, by comparison with the universe, in the place of a point; our own age has a smaller portion than a point, if it be compared with all time, whose measure is greater than the world's—seeing that the world remeasures itself within the space of all time so many times over. What does it matter, then, to extend that whose increase, however great it be, will not be far from nothing? In one way only is it much that we live: if it is enough.

Though you should name to me men of long life, and old age handed down to memory, and count up a hundred and ten years for each, yet when you have let your mind range over all time, there will be no difference at all between the shortest and the longest span, if, having examined how long a space each man has lived, you compare it with how long he has not lived.

Next, he died ripe for himself; for he lived as long as he ought to have lived, nothing now remained to him beyond. Old age is not one and the same for men, as it is not even for the animals. Some it has worn out within fourteen years, and this, their longest age, is for man his first; an unequal capacity for living is given to each. No one dies too soon, because he was not going to live longer than he did live.

A boundary is fixed for each; it will remain forever where it has been set, nor will any diligence or favour move it further on. Hold it thus, that you lost him by design. He took his own, and reached the goal of the span allotted him.

There is therefore no reason for you to burden yourself thus: “He could have lived longer.” His life was not cut short, nor does chance ever thrust itself among the years. What is promised to each is paid; the fates go their own way, and neither add anything nor take anything once for all from what was promised. Prayers and pains are in vain; each will have just so much as his first day assigned him. From that day on which he first saw the light, he entered upon the road to death and drew nearer to his fate, and the very years that were added to his youth were taken from his life. We are all caught up in this error, that we think only the old and the already declining bend toward death, when infancy at once, and youth, and every age leads thither. The fates do their work; they take from us the sense of our own dying, and, that death may the more easily steal upon us, it lurks beneath the very name of life; infancy childhood turns into itself, childhood youth turns, the old age has carried off the young man. The very increases, if you reckon well, are losses.

Do you complain, Marcia, that your son did not live as long as he might have? For how do you know whether it was to his advantage to live longer? whether by this death his interest was served? Can you find anyone today whose affairs are so well placed and so firmly founded that he need fear nothing from the advance of time? Human things waver and flow away, nor is any part of our life so exposed or so tender as that which most pleases us; and therefore for the most fortunate death is a thing to be prayed for, since in so great an inconstancy and turmoil of things nothing is certain save what is past.

Who guarantees to you that that most beautiful body of your son, preserved under the strictest guard of modesty amid the eyes of a luxurious city, could have escaped so many diseases as to carry the glory of its form unimpaired into old age? Think of the thousand blemishes of the mind; for not even upright natures have carried on into old age such promise of themselves as they had given in youth, but are for the most part perverted; either a luxury that comes late—and is the fouler for that—invaded them and began to dishonour their splendid beginnings, or they sank wholly into the cookshop and the belly, and their chief care was what they should eat, what they should drink.

Add fires, ruins, shipwrecks, and the manglings of physicians who pick the bones from the living and plunge their whole hands into the entrails and treat the privy parts with no slight pain; after these, exile (your son was no more innocent than Rutilius), prison (he was no wiser than Socrates), a breast pierced by a self-inflicted wound (he was no more blameless than Cato). When you have surveyed these things, you will know that it goes best with those whom Nature, because this term of life-service awaited them, has quickly received into safety. Nothing is so deceptive as human life, nothing so treacherous; by Heaven, no one would have accepted it, were it not given to us unawares. Therefore, if it is most fortunate not to be born, the next best thing, I think, is, having ended a brief life, to be quickly restored to wholeness again.

Set before yourself that most bitter time when Sejanus gave your father as a largess to his client Satrius Secundus. He was angry with him on account of one or two too-free remarks, because he could not bear in silence that Sejanus was not only being set upon our necks, but was climbing onto them. A statue was being voted to be set up to Sejanus in Pompey's theatre, which Caesar was rebuilding after a fire; Cordus cried out that then indeed the theatre was perishing. What then? Should he not burst with rage that Sejanus was being set up over the ashes of Gnaeus

Pompey, and a treacherous soldier consecrated among the monuments of the greatest of commanders? The signature is consecrated, and the fiercest hounds—whom he fed on human blood, that he might keep them tame to himself alone and savage to all others—begin to bay round the man, already caught now in the snare. What was he to do?

If he wished to live, Sejanus must be entreated; if to die, his daughter—and both were inexorable. He resolved to deceive his daughter. So, having used the bath, that he might lay aside the more of his strength, he betook himself to his bedchamber as though to take some food, and, having dismissed the slaves, threw some of it out through the window, that he might seem to have eaten; then he abstained from dinner, as though he had already eaten enough in his chamber. The second day too, and the third, he did the same; the fourth betrayed him by the very weakness of his body. So, embracing you, he said: “Dearest daughter, and this one thing hidden from you through my whole life, I have entered upon the road to death, and am now nearly at the midpoint; you neither ought nor are able to call me back.” And so he ordered all light to be shut out, and buried himself in darkness.

When his plan was known, there was public rejoicing that the prey was being led out from the jaws of the most greedy wolves. The accusers, at Sejanus's prompting, go to the tribunals of the consuls and complain that Cordus is dying, that they may interrupt the very thing they had compelled; so completely did Cordus seem to them to be escaping. It was a great question under inquiry, whether the accused should lose their right to death; while it was being deliberated, while the accusers go a second time, he had acquitted himself. Do you see, Marcia, what great reversals of unjust times rush upon us out of the blue? Do you weep that one of your kin was forced to die? It was all but not permitted!

Apart from this, that all the future is uncertain, and more certainly inclines to the worse, the road to the gods above is easiest for souls dismissed early from human intercourse; for they have drawn off the least of dregs and of weight. Set free before they grew hard and took in the things of earth more deeply, they fly back the lighter to their origin, and the more easily wash off whatever there is of the soiled and the smeared upon them.

Nor is a delay in the body ever dear to great souls; they yearn to go forth and break out, they bear these straits with reluctance, accustomed to range over all things, lofty, and from on high to look down upon human affairs. Hence it is that Plato cries that the wise man's soul leans wholly toward death, wills this, meditates this, and is ever borne by this desire as it stretches toward the things outside.

What? When you, Marcia, saw in the youth the prudence of an old man, a mind victor over all pleasures, corrected, free from vice, seeking riches without avarice, honours without ambition, pleasures without excess—did you think you could have him safe and sound for long? Whatever has reached the summit is near its end. Perfected virtue snatches and bears itself away from our eyes, and what has ripened in its first season does not await its last. The brighter a fire has blazed, the sooner it is quenched;

longer-lived is the one which, set to a slow and stubborn material and sunk in smoke, shines out of the murk; for the same cause holds it which grudgingly feeds it. So natures, the more illustrious, are the briefer; for where there is no room for increase, ruin is near.

Fabianus tells—a thing which our own parents too saw—that there was at Rome a boy of the stature of a tall man; but he soon died, and no prudent man failed to say beforehand that he would soon die; for he could not reach that age which he had outrun. So it is: excessive ripeness is the sign of impending destruction; the end draws on where the increases have been used up.

Begin to value him by his virtues, not by his years; he has lived long enough. Left an orphan, he was under the charge of guardians until his fourteenth year, and always under his mother's care. Though he had his own household gods, he would not leave yours, and persevered in his mother's company, a thing children scarcely endure even with a father. As a young man of fine stature, beauty, and sure bodily strength, born for the camp, he refused military service, that he might not depart from you.

Reckon, Marcia, how seldom those see their children who dwell in separate houses; consider that all those years are lost to mothers, and spent in anxiety, in which they have their sons in the army: you will know that this time was a wide stretch, from which you lost nothing. He never withdrew from your sight; under your eyes he formed his studies, of excellent talent and one that would have equalled his grandfather's, had not his modesty stood in the way—that modesty which by its silence has suppressed the advance of many.

A young man of the rarest beauty, amid so great a throng of women who corrupt men, he held himself out to the hope of none; and when the shamelessness of certain of them had gone so far as to make trial of him, he blushed as though he had sinned, because he had given pleasure. By this purity of conduct he brought it about that, while still quite a boy, he was thought worthy of a priesthood—by his mother's canvassing, no doubt, but not even a mother's canvassing would have availed except for a good candidate.

In the contemplation of these virtues hold your son as though in your bosom! Now he is more at leisure for you, now he has nothing to call him away; never will he be a cause of anxiety to you, never of grief. The one thing you could grieve over in so good a son, you have grieved; the rest, exempt from misfortune, is full of pleasure, if only you know how to use your son, if only you understand what was most precious in him.

Only the image of your son has perished, and a likeness not very like; he himself is indeed eternal, and now in a better state, stripped of his alien burdens and left to himself. These things you see surrounding us—bones and sinews and the skin drawn over them, the face and the ministering hands and the rest in which we are wrapped—are the chains and the darkness of souls. By these the soul is overwhelmed, choked, infected, kept from what is true and its own, flung into what is false. All its struggle is with this heavy flesh, lest it be dragged away and sink; it strives toward the place from which it was sent down. There an eternal rest awaits it, when it shall behold, in place of confused and gross things, the pure and the clear.

Therefore there is no reason for you to run to your son's tomb; what lies there is his worst part, and the part most troublesome to himself—bones and ashes, no more parts of him than the garments and the other coverings of bodies. Whole, and leaving nothing of himself on earth, he has fled and wholly departed; and, having tarried a little while above us, while he is being purified and shaking off the vices that cling to him and all the rust of mortal life, then, lifted to the heights, he runs among the happy souls.

A holy company received him—the Scipios and the Catos, and, among the despisers of life and those set free by poison, your father, Marcia. He draws his grandson to himself—although there all are kin to all—as he rejoices in the new light, and teaches him the courses of the neighbouring stars; and, no guesser, but skilled in the truth of all things, he gladly leads him into the secrets of Nature; and, as one who points out unknown cities is welcome to a stranger, so is he, an at-home interpreter, to one who inquires into the causes of the heavenly bodies. And he bids him send his gaze down into the depths of the earth; for it delights one, from on high, to look back upon what has been left behind.

So bear yourself, then, Marcia, as though set under the eyes of your father and your son—not those you had known, but so much loftier and set on the heights. Blush to think anything low or vulgar, and to weep for your dear ones changed for the better! Through the free and vast spaces of eternal things they have been let go; no seas flowing between shut them off, no height of mountains, no impassable valleys, nor the shoals of the uncertain Syrtes: there all is level, and they, swift and unencumbered, pass freely through one another and are mingled with the stars.

Suppose, then, Marcia, that from that citadel of heaven your father—who had as much authority with you as you with your son—says, not with that genius with which he bewailed the civil wars, with which he himself proscribed for eternity the men who proscribed, but in a strain as much loftier as he is himself more sublime:

“Why, daughter, does so long a grief hold you? Why do you live in such ignorance of the truth as to judge that your son was unfairly dealt with, because, with the state of his house unimpaired, he himself, unimpaired, betook himself to his ancestors? Do you not know with what great storms Fortune throws all things into confusion? How to none has she shown herself kindly and easy save to those who had had the least to do with her? Shall I name to you kings who would have been most fortunate had death snatched them sooner from the evils that pressed upon them? or Roman generals, of whose greatness nothing will be lacking if you take something from their years? or men most noble and most illustrious who bowed their necks, set in position, to the stroke of a soldier's sword?

Look at your father and your grandfather: the one came under the discretion of a stranger's executioner; I permitted no one any power over me, and, cutting off my food, I showed that I had written with as great a spirit as I seemed to have. Why is the one who dies most happily mourned the longest in our house? We all come together into one place, and we see, surrounded by no deep night, that with you there is nothing, as you suppose, to be wished for, nothing lofty, nothing splendid, but all things low and heavy and full of anxiety, and discerning how small a part of our light!

What shall I say—that here no arms rage in mutual onsets, nor fleets shattered against fleets, nor parricides either feigned or contrived, nor forums loud with lawsuits the day long; that nothing is in the dark, that minds lie open and hearts disclosed, and life in the public and the midst of all, and a prospect of every age and of those to come?

It used to delight me to set in order the deeds of a single generation, done in the farthest part of the world and among a very few men. Now it is permitted to view so many generations, the whole woven series of the ages, all the years there are; it is permitted to look ahead at kingdoms about to rise, at kingdoms about to fall, and at the downfalls of great cities and the new courses of the sea.

For if it can be a comfort to you in your longing that the fate is common, nothing will stand fast in the place where it stands; old age will lay all things low and bear them away with it. And it will make sport not of men only (for how small a portion is that of its fortuitous power?), but of places, of regions, of the parts of the world. It will efface whole mountains, and elsewhere force up new crags on high; it will swallow seas, turn rivers aside, and, breaking off the commerce of nations, dissolve the fellowship and gathering of the human race; elsewhere it will draw down cities into vast chasms, shake them with tremors, and from the depths send up the breath of pestilence, and with floods cover over whatever is inhabited, and kill every living thing with the world submerged, and scorch and burn up mortal things with vast fires. And when the time shall have come at which the world, about to renew itself, shall put itself out, these things will dash themselves to pieces by their own forces, and stars will run against stars, and, with all matter ablaze, in one fire whatever now shines in due order will burn.

We too, happy souls and allotted what is eternal, when it shall seem good to God to set these things in motion again, amid the falling of all things shall ourselves, a small accession to the mighty ruin, be turned back into our ancient elements.” Happy your son, Marcia, who already knows these things!