Consolation to Polybius

...Buildings and monuments raised in stone, if you compare them with our own life, are durable; but if you measure them against the law of a Nature that destroys all things and recalls them to the place from which she sent them forth, they are perishable. For what that mortal hands have made is immortal? Those Seven Wonders, and any others far more wonderful than these that the ambition of later years has reared, will one day be seen levelled with the ground. So it is: nothing is everlasting, few things are even long-lasting; each thing is frail after its own fashion, the ways of their ending differ, but whatever has a beginning has also an end.

Some men threaten the universe itself with destruction, and this whole frame that embraces all things divine and human—if you think it right to believe it—some day shall be scattered and plunged back into the old chaos and darkness. Let a man go now and bewail single souls; let him lament the ashes of Carthage and Numantia and Corinth, and of anything else that has fallen from a greater height, when even this universe, which has no place into which it can fall, must perish; let a man go and complain that the fates, which will one day dare so monstrous a deed, did not spare him.

Who is so haughty, so unbridled in his arrogance, that amid this necessity of Nature, which recalls all things to one and the same end, he should wish that he alone and his own should be set apart, and should withdraw some single house from the ruin that threatens the very universe?

It is, therefore, the greatest of consolations to reflect that what has befallen oneself has been suffered by all who went before and will be suffered by all who come after; and Nature seems to me, for this reason, to have made common what she had made hardest, so that the equality of fate might console us for its cruelty.

This too will help you not a little, if you reflect that your grief will do no good either to him whom you mourn or to yourself; for you will not wish a thing to be prolonged that is to no purpose. If by sorrow we could accomplish anything, I would not refuse to pour out for your misfortune whatever tears my own had left me; even now I would find something to flow from these eyes of mine, already drained by weeping for my own household—if only it would do you any good.

Why do you hold back? Let us make complaint; indeed, I will take up this suit as my own: "O Fortune, in the judgement of all men the most unjust, until now you seemed to have kept that man safe in your bosom, who through your gift had won such reverence that—a thing that has fallen to few—his good fortune escaped all envy. But see, you have stamped upon him the deepest grief he could feel while Caesar yet lives; and when you had gone all round about him, you perceived that on this side alone he lay open to your blows. For what else could you do to him?

Could you have snatched away his money? He was never its slave; even now, so far as he can, he drives it from him, and amid such ease in acquiring it he seeks from it no greater profit than the contempt of it.

Could you have snatched away his friends? You knew him to be so lovable that he could easily have set others in the place of those he lost; for of all the men I have seen powerful in the imperial household, this one alone seems to me a man whom it serves your interest to have as a friend to all—and yet whom one is still more pleased to have so.

Could you have snatched away his good name? With him this stands too firm for even you to shake it. Could you have snatched away good health? You knew that his mind, schooled—nay, born—in liberal studies, was so well founded that it rose superior to all the pains of the body. Could you have snatched away his breath of life?

How little harm you would have done him! The fame of his genius has promised him a life of the longest span; he himself has brought it about that he should endure in the better part of himself, and by composing illustrious works of eloquence has rescued himself from mortality. As long as letters shall have any honour, as long as the power of the Latin tongue or the grace of the Greek shall stand, he will flourish in the company of the greatest men, with whose genius he has either matched his own or—if his modesty refuses this—has joined it.

This, then, is the one thing you devised, the way you could most deeply harm him; for the better a man is, the more often have you grown used to assailing him, raging without any discernment, to be feared even amid your very favours. How small a thing it would have been for you to keep that man free from this wrong, the man to whom your kindness seemed to have come by sure reason, and not, as is your way, to have fallen upon him by mere chance!"

Let us add to these complaints, if you will, the promise of the young man himself, cut off in the first growth of his powers; he was worthy to be your brother. You, surely, were most worthy never to grieve even over an unworthy brother. The same testimony is rendered to him by all men alike: he is missed, in honour of you; he is praised, in honour of himself.

There was nothing in him that you would not gladly have acknowledged. You, indeed, would have been good even to a less good brother; but in him your brotherly love, having found fitting material, exercised itself far more freely. No one felt his power through any wrong; he never threatened anyone with you as his brother. He had moulded himself upon the pattern of your moderation, and he reflected how great an ornament you were to your kin, and how great a burden; he was equal to that load.

O harsh fates, fair to no man's virtues! Before your brother had come to know his own good fortune, he was taken away. But I know that I do not show indignation enough; for nothing is harder than to find words to match a great grief. Yet even now, if we can do any good by it, let us make complaint:

"What did you mean, Fortune, so unjust and so violent? Did you so soon repent of your own kindness? What cruelty is this, to make your onset upon brothers in their midst, and by so bloody a plundering to diminish a household most harmonious? Did you wish to throw into confusion a house so well stocked with the noblest of young men, in no brother degenerate, and without any cause to thin its ranks

? Does innocence, then, schooled to every law, avail nothing; nothing the old-time frugality; nothing the highest power amid the height of fortune preserved by the highest self-restraint; nothing the pure and untroubled love of letters; nothing a mind free of every stain? Polybius mourns; and, in the death of one brother, warned of what he may fear for the rest, he is fearful even for the very comforts of his grief. A monstrous deed! Polybius mourns, and grieves at something while Caesar is gracious! This, beyond doubt, you were aiming at, unbridled Fortune—to show that against you no one, not even by Caesar, can be defended."

We can go on accusing the fates, but we cannot change them. They stand harsh and inexorable; no man moves them by reproach, none by weeping, none by pleading his cause; they never spare anyone, nor make any concession. Therefore let us spare ourselves the tears that profit nothing; for this grief of ours will sooner bring us to join the dead than bring them back to us. And if it tortures us without helping, it must be laid aside at the earliest moment, and the mind must be reclaimed from empty comforts and from a certain bitter craving to indulge its woe.

For unless reason puts an end to our tears, Fortune will not. Come, look round upon all mankind: everywhere there is ample and unceasing matter for weeping. One man toilsome poverty summons to his daily labour; another ambition that is never at rest harasses; one man dreads the very riches he had prayed for, and is plagued by his own wish fulfilled; one is tormented by solitude, another by the crowd that forever besieges his door; this man grieves that he has children, that man that he has lost them. Our tears will fail us sooner than the causes for our grieving.

Do you not see what manner of life Nature has promised us, she who willed that the first act of men at their birth should be weeping? With this beginning we are brought forth, and to this the whole sequence of the years that follow is in keeping. Thus we pass our lives; and therefore that which must be done so often ought to be done by us with moderation, and, looking back upon how great a store of sorrowful things hangs over us behind, we ought, if not to make an end of tears, at least to keep them in reserve. Nothing should be husbanded more than this, whose use is so frequent.

This too will help you not a little, if you reflect that your grief is pleasing to none less than to him to whom it seems to be paid; he either does not wish you to be tortured, or does not know it. There is therefore no reason in such a service, which to him for whom it is performed—if he feels nothing—is superfluous, and if he feels it, is unwelcome.

I would boldly declare that there is no one in the whole world who takes delight in your tears. What then? Do you believe that your brother bears toward you a mind that no one else bears against you—that by your torment he would do you harm, that he would wish to draw you away from your occupations, that is, from your studies and from Caesar? This has no likeness to the truth. For he gave you affection as to a brother, reverence as to a parent, devotion as to a superior; he wishes you to feel his loss, he does not wish you to be tormented. What good is it, then, to waste away in a grief which, if the dead have any feeling, your brother longs to see ended?

Of another brother, whose will might be thought uncertain, I would set all these things in doubt, and would say: "If your brother longs to have you tortured by tears that never cease, he is unworthy of this love of yours; if he does not wish it, then dismiss a grief that hurts you both: neither should an unbrotherly brother be mourned in this way, nor would a loving one wish it." But in the case of one whose devotion is so thoroughly proved, this must be held for certain—that nothing could be more bitter to him than that this loss of his should be bitter to you, that it should torment you in any way, that it should both trouble and exhaust those eyes of yours, most undeserving of this evil, with weeping that knows no end.

Yet nothing will so draw your devotion away from tears thus useless as the thought that you ought to be an example to your brothers of bearing this wrong of Fortune bravely. What great generals do when their affairs are desperate—deliberately feign cheerfulness and hide adversity beneath a counterfeit gladness, lest the soldiers' spirits, if they saw their leader's mind broken, should themselves collapse—this you too must now do.

Put on a face unlike your true feeling, and, if you can, cast off all your grief utterly; if not, hide it away within and keep it from showing, and take pains that your brothers imitate you, who will think honourable whatever they see you doing, and will take their spirit from your countenance. You ought to be both their solace and their comforter; but you will not be able to withstand their mourning if you give way to your own.

This consideration too can keep you from excessive mourning, if you remind yourself that none of the things you do can be kept hidden. The common consent of men has laid upon you a great role; this you must maintain. All that throng has gathered round you to be consoled, and it scans your mind and observes how much strength it has against grief, and whether you know only how to use prosperity skilfully, or can also bear adversity like a man. Your eyes are watched.

All things are freer for those whose feelings can be concealed; for you no privacy is free. Fortune has set you in a great light; all men will know how you have borne yourself in this wound of yours—whether the moment you were struck you laid down your arms, or held your ground. Long since both Caesar's love has raised you to a higher rank and your own studies have led you up. Nothing common befits you, nothing humble. And what is so humble and womanish as to surrender oneself to be consumed by grief?

Even in equal mourning the same is not permitted to you as to your brothers; much the opinion held of your studies and your character will not allow you, much men demand of you, much they expect. If you wished all things to be permitted you, you should not have turned the eyes of all upon yourself; but now you must make good as much as you have promised. All those men who praise the works of your genius, who copy them, who—though they have no need of your fortune—have need of your genius, are the guardians of your mind. You can never do anything so unworthy of your standing as a finished and learned man that many would not repent of their admiration for you.

You are not permitted to weep without measure—and this is not all that is forbidden you: you are not permitted even to lengthen your sleep into the daytime, nor to flee from the bustle of affairs into the quiet leisure of the country, nor to refresh a body wearied by the unbroken duty of your laborious post with a pleasure-seeking journey abroad, nor to engage your mind with the variety of the public shows, nor to dispose of your day at your own discretion. Many things are not permitted you that are permitted to the very lowest and to those who lie hidden in their corner. Great fortune is great slavery; you are not permitted to do anything at your own discretion.

You must give hearing to so many thousands of men, so many petitions must be set in order; so great a heap of business, gathered together from the whole world, must be sifted, that it may be laid in due order before the mind of our supreme prince. You are not permitted, I say, to weep; that you may be able to hear the many who weep, that you may dry the tears of those in peril who long to reach the mercy of the most merciful Caesar, your own tears must be dried.

These remedies, however, will help you even now, though they are the lighter ones; but when you wish to forget all things, think of Caesar. Consider how great a return of loyalty, how great an industry you owe to his kindness toward you; you will understand that you are no more permitted to bow down than is he—if there be any such figure handed down in story—on whose shoulders the universe rests.

Even Caesar himself, to whom all things are permitted, for that very reason is not permitted many things. His watchfulness guards the sleep of all, his toil the leisure of all, his industry the pleasures of all, his occupation the freedom of all from care. From the time when Caesar dedicated himself to the world, he robbed himself of himself; and, like the stars which, never resting, forever run their courses, he is never permitted to halt or to do anything of his own.

To a certain degree, therefore, the same necessity is laid upon you also; you are not permitted to look to your own advantage, to your own studies. While Caesar possesses the world, you cannot give yourself either to pleasure or to grief or to anything else; you owe yourself wholly to Caesar.

Add now that, since you always declare Caesar to be dearer to you than your own breath, it is not right for you to complain of Fortune while Caesar is safe. While he is unharmed, your own are safe to you; you have lost nothing: not only ought your eyes to be dry, but even glad; in him you have all things, he stands in the place of all. And—a thing far removed from your most wise and most loving feelings—you are too little grateful for your good fortune if you permit yourself to weep at all while he is safe.

I will point out to you, even now, a remedy not indeed more powerful but more familiar. Whenever you have withdrawn to your home, then it is that sadness is to be feared by you. For as long as you gaze upon your divinity, sadness will find no access to you; Caesar will hold all of you fast; but when you have departed from him, then, as though an opportunity were given it, grief will lie in wait for your solitude, and will creep little by little upon your mind as it takes its rest.

And so there is no reason for you to suffer any time to be empty of your studies. Then let your letters, so long and so faithfully loved, render you their grace; then let them claim you as their high priest and worshipper; then let Homer and Virgil—men who have deserved as well of the human race as you have deserved both of them and of all men, whom you wished to be known to more than had read them—abide long with you; safe will be all the time that you have entrusted to their keeping. Then, so far as you can, compose the deeds of your Caesar, that they may be told throughout all ages by the heralding of his own household; for he himself will give you both the matter and the model for shaping and recording history at its best.

I do not dare to lead you so far as to bid you weave together also, with your wonted charm, fables and Aesopic tales, a task untried by Roman talents. It is hard, indeed, that a mind so violently stricken should be able so soon to approach these more cheerful studies; yet take this as proof that it is already strengthened and restored to itself, if it shall be able to pass from sterner writings to these lighter ones.

For in the former, the very austerity of the matters he will handle will divert him, though still sick and struggling with himself; but these, which must be composed with an unfurrowed brow, he will not endure unless he has already become wholly settled within himself. And so you ought first to exercise him with sterner material, then to temper him with the more cheerful.

This too will be a great relief to you, if you often ask yourself thus: "Do I grieve on my own account, or on his who has died? If on my own, the parade of my devotion is gone, and grief, excused on this one ground alone—that it is honourable—begins, when it has regard to advantage, to fall away from love; but nothing less befits a good man than to keep accounts in a brother's mourning.

If I grieve on his account, I must judge one of these two things to be true. For if no feeling survives in the dead, then my brother has escaped all the troubles of life and has been restored to that place in which he was before he was born, and, free of every evil, he fears nothing, desires nothing, suffers nothing. What madness is this, that I should never cease to grieve for one who will never grieve?

If the dead have any feeling, then now my brother's soul, set free as if from a long imprisonment, at last its own master and at its own disposal, exults and enjoys the spectacle of Nature, and looks down from a higher place upon all things human, while upon things divine, whose explanation it had so long sought in vain, it gazes more closely. Why, then, do I waste away with longing for him who is either blessed or nothing? To weep for the blessed is envy, for the nothing is madness."

Or does this move you, that he seems to have been deprived of vast goods that were even now poured all about him? When you reflect that there are many things he has lost, reflect that there are more that he does not fear. Anger will not torture him, disease will not afflict him, suspicion will not assail him, gnawing envy, ever the enemy of others' advancement, will not pursue him, fear will not harass him, the fickleness of Fortune, swiftly transferring her gifts, will not disquiet him. If you reckon rightly, more has been remitted to him than taken away.

He will not enjoy wealth, nor the regard of yourself and of his own; he will not receive favours, nor bestow them. Do you think him wretched because he has lost these things, or blessed because he does not miss them? Believe me, he is the more blessed for whom Fortune is superfluous than he for whom she is at hand. All those goods that delight us with a fair but treacherous pleasure—money, dignity, power, and very many other things at which the blind cupidity of the human race stands agape—are possessed with toil, are looked upon with envy, and at last weigh down the very men whom they adorn; they threaten more than they profit. They are slippery and uncertain, are never well held fast; for even though nothing be feared from the time to come, the very safeguarding of great prosperity is full of anxiety.

If you would believe those who look more deeply into the truth, all life is a punishment. Cast forth into this deep and restless sea, that ebbs and flows with alternate tides, and now lifts us up with sudden risings, now hurls us down with greater losses and tosses us unceasingly, we never come to rest in a stable place; we hang and waver and are dashed one against another, and now and then make shipwreck, ever in fear;

for those sailing on this sea, so stormy and exposed to every tempest, there is no harbour but death. Do not, then, grudge your brother his lot; he is at rest. At last he is free, at last secure, at last eternal. He has Caesar surviving him, and all his offspring; he has you surviving, together with the brothers you share. Before Fortune changed anything of her favour, he left her still standing and heaping up her gifts with full hand.

He enjoys now the open and free heaven; from a lowly and sunken place he has darted up into that region, whatever it be, that receives in its blessed bosom souls released from their chains, and now he ranges there at liberty and surveys with the highest delight all the goods of Nature. You are mistaken: your brother has not lost the light, but has been allotted a purer one. The road thither is common to us all.

Why do we bewail the fates? He has not left us, but gone before. There is, believe me, great good fortune in the very necessity of dying. Nothing, not even for a single whole day, is certain. Who, amid a truth so dark and tangled, can divine whether death has envied your brother or taken thought for him?

This too—such is your justice in all things—must needs help you, if you reflect that no wrong has been done you in losing such a brother, but a kindness conferred in that it was permitted you so long to use and enjoy his devotion.

He is unjust who does not leave to the giver the disposal of his gift, greedy who counts what he has received not as profit but as loss when he gives it back. He is ungrateful who calls the ending of a pleasure a wrong; foolish, who thinks there is no enjoyment of good things save of present ones, who does not find rest also in things past and judge those things surer that are gone, because about them there is no need to fear that they will cease.

He too narrows his joys too much who thinks he enjoys only what he has and sees, and counts as nothing having had the same; for every pleasure swiftly leaves us, that flows and passes and is all but snatched away before it comes. Therefore the mind must be sent back into the time past, and whatever ever delighted us must be recalled and dwelt upon in frequent reflection; longer and more faithful is the memory of pleasures than their presence. Set down, then, the fact that you had the best of brothers among your highest goods!

There is no reason for you to consider how much longer you might have had him, but how long you did have him. Nature gave him to you, as she gave their brothers to others, not as a possession but as a loan; then, when it seemed good to her, she called him back, and she did so not because she had had enough of you in him, but in keeping with her own law.

If a man should take it ill that he had repaid borrowed money—and especially money the use of which he had received free of charge—would he not be held an unjust man? Nature gave your brother life, gave it also to you. If she, using her own right, has called in her debt sooner than she chose from whom she chose, she is not at fault, for her terms were known; the fault lies with the greedy hope of the mortal mind, which from time to time forgets what Nature is, and never remembers its own lot save when it is reminded.

Rejoice, therefore, that you had so good a brother, and make good use of him while you had him, even though it was for a shorter time than your wish. Reflect that it was a most delightful thing that you had him, a human thing that you have lost him. For nothing is less consistent than that a man should be moved because he had such a brother for too short a time, and should not rejoice that he had him at all.

"But he was snatched from me when I did not expect it." Every man is deceived by his own credulity, and, in the case of those he loves, by a wilful forgetting of mortality. Nature has declared that she will make for no one an exception from her necessity. Every day the funerals of men known and unknown pass before our eyes, yet we are busy with other things and think that sudden which is announced to us all our life long as bound to come. This, then, is not the injustice of the fates, but the perversity of the human mind, insatiable of all things, which is indignant at being cast out from a place into which it was admitted only on sufferance.

How much juster was that man who, when the death of his son was announced to him, uttered words worthy of a great man: "When I begot him, I knew then that he would die." You need not wonder at all that one was born of him who could die bravely. He did not receive the death of his son as new tidings; for what is there new in a man's dying, whose whole life is nothing else than a journey toward death? "When I begot him, I knew then that he would die."

Then he added a saying of still greater wisdom and spirit: "And it was for this that I reared him." For this we are all reared; whoever is brought forth to life is destined for death. Let us rejoice, then, in what shall be given, and give it back when it is demanded again. The fates will lay hold of one at one time, another at another; they will pass no one by. Let the mind stand ready for the onset, and never fear what is necessary, ever expect what is uncertain.

Why should I speak of generals, and the offspring of generals, and men conspicuous for many consulships or triumphs, undone by an inexorable lot? Whole kingdoms with their kings, and peoples with their rulers, have borne their doom; all men—nay, all things—look toward their last day. The end is not the same for all: life forsakes one man in mid-course, leaves another at the very threshold, and from another, already wearied in extreme old age and longing to depart, scarcely lets him go; at one time or another, all of us alike are bound for the same place. Whether it be the more foolish to be ignorant of the law of mortality, or the more shameless to refuse it, I do not know.

Come now, take in hand those poems of either author that you have made famous by the great labour of your genius—poems that you have so recast that, although their structure has fallen away, their grace nevertheless remains; for so have you carried them over from one tongue into another that—a most difficult thing—all their virtues have followed you into a foreign speech: there will be no book in those writings that does not supply you with very many examples of the changefulness of man's lot, of uncertain chances, and of tears flowing from one cause after another.

Read with what spirit you have thundered in mighty words; you will be ashamed suddenly to fail and to fall away from such grandeur of utterance. Do not bring it to pass that whoever was admiring your writings as a model should ask how so frail a mind conceived things so grand and so solid.

Rather turn yourself from these things, which torment you, to those so many and so great things which console; and look upon your excellent brothers, look upon your wife, look upon your son; for the safety of all these Fortune has settled with you at this price. You have many in whom you may find rest. Save yourself from this reproach—lest it seem to all men that one grief weighs more with you than these so many comforts.

You see that all these are stricken together with you, and you understand that they cannot come to your aid—nay, that they are themselves waiting to be relieved by you; and therefore the less learning and the less talent there is in them, the more must you set yourself against the common woe. It is, moreover, itself a kind of solace to divide one's grief among many; for since it is shared out among several, only a scanty portion ought to remain with you. I shall not cease to offer Caesar to you again and again.

While he governs the earth and shows how much better an empire is guarded by benefits than by arms, while he presides over human affairs, there is no danger that you should feel you have lost anything; in him alone you have safeguard enough, comfort enough. Lift yourself up, and as often as tears rise in your eyes, so often turn them upon Caesar; they will be dried by the sight of that greatest and most glorious divinity; his radiance will dazzle them so that they can look upon nothing else, and will hold them fixed upon himself.

He, on whom you gaze by day and by night, from whom you never turn your mind, must be in your thoughts; he must be called upon to stand against Fortune. And I do not doubt that, since he has such gentleness toward all his own and such kindness, he has already covered over that wound of yours with many comforts, has already heaped up many things to withstand your grief. What more? Even had he done none of these things, would not the very sight of Caesar, by itself alone, and the very thought of him, be the greatest solace to you?

May the gods and goddesses lend him long to the earth! May he equal the deeds of the deified Augustus, and surpass him in years! As long as he shall be among mortals, may he feel that nothing in his own house is mortal! May he, by long-tested loyalty, approve his son as ruler over the Roman empire, and behold him as partner in his father's power before he sees him as successor! Late, and known only to our grandchildren, be the day on which his own race shall claim him for heaven!

Keep your hands off this man, Fortune, and do not show your power over him save in that part in which you do good! Suffer him to heal the human race, long sick and afflicted, suffer him to restore and set back in their place all that the madness of the former prince has shaken! May this star, which has shone forth upon a world flung headlong into the deep and sunk in darkness, ever give its light!

May he bring peace to Germany, open up Britain, and lead both his father's triumphs and new ones; of these his clemency—which holds the first place among his virtues—promises that I too shall be a spectator. For he did not cast me down so as to refuse to raise me up again; nay, he did not even cast me down, but, when I had been thrust and was falling by Fortune's hand, he held me up, and, as I was rushing headlong, with the restraint of his divine hand he set me gently down; he interceded for me with the senate, and not only gave me my life but even begged it for me. Let him see to it: let him judge my case to be such as he wishes it to be.

Either let his justice perceive it to be good, or let his clemency make it good; in either case his kindness will be equal in my eyes, whether he shall know me to be innocent, or shall wish me to be so. Meanwhile it is a great solace for my miseries to see his mercy ranging over the whole world; and since, even from the very corner in which I am sunk, it has dug out and brought back to light many men overwhelmed by the ruin of long years past, I do not fear that it will pass over me alone. But he himself knows best the time at which he ought to come to each man's aid; I, for my part, will do all I can that he need not blush to come to me.

O blessed clemency of yours, Caesar, which brings it about that exiles live a quieter life under you than princes lately lived under Gaius! They do not tremble, nor look hour by hour for the sword, nor take fright at the sight of every ship; through you they have, as a measure set to raging Fortune, so also a hope of better fortune from the same source, and the quiet of the present. You may be sure that those thunderbolts alone are most just which even the men they strike revere.

This prince, then, who is the common solace of all mankind, has—unless everything deceives me—already revived your spirit and applied to so great a wound remedies still greater. He has already strengthened you in every way; already, with his most retentive memory, he has called to mind all the examples by which you might be driven toward a calm of mind; already, with the eloquence familiar to him, he has set forth the precepts of all the wise.

And so no one could better undertake this office of consolation. His words, when he speaks them, will carry a different weight, like utterances sent from an oracle; his divine authority will crush all the force of your grief. Imagine, then, that he speaks thus to you: "Fortune has not singled out you alone, to afflict you with so grievous a wrong; there is not, nor has there been, a house in all the world without some affliction to set beside it. I will pass over the common examples, which, though slighter, are yet beyond number, and will lead you to the public records and annals.

Do you see all these portrait-masks that have filled the hall of the Caesars? There is not one of them that is not marked by some misfortune of its house; not one of those men who shine forth as the glory of the ages but was either tortured by longing for his own kin or by his own kin was mourned with the keenest anguish of soul.

Why should I tell you of Scipio Africanus, to whom the death of his brother was announced while he was in exile? That brother who had snatched his brother from prison could not snatch him from fate. And how impatient of equal law Africanus' brotherly love was, became plain to all; for on the very day on which Scipio Africanus had rescued his brother from the officer's hands, he, though a private citizen, interposed his veto even against a tribune of the plebs. Yet with as great a spirit did he mourn his brother as he had defended him.

Why should I mention Scipio Aemilianus, who at almost one and the same time looked upon his father's triumph and the funerals of his two brothers? Yet, though but a young man, and almost a boy, he bore the sudden desolation of his family, falling to ruin upon the very triumph of Paulus, with as great a spirit as it behoved a man to show who was born for this—that neither should a Scipio be wanting to the city of Rome, nor a Carthage survive.

Why should I mention the harmony of the two Luculli, sundered by death? Why the Pompeys, to whom raging Fortune did not leave even this—to fall in one and the same overthrow? Sextus Pompeius first lived on, the survivor of his sister, by whose death the bonds of the well-knit Roman peace were loosed; and this same man lived on, the survivor of his excellent brother, whom Fortune had raised on high for this end, that she might cast him down no less deep than she had cast down his father; and yet, even after this calamity, Sextus Pompeius was equal not only to his grief, but to war besides.

Examples of brothers parted by death come to mind from all sides without number; nay, on the contrary, scarcely ever has any pair of them been seen growing old together. But I shall be content with examples from our own house; for no one will be so devoid of feeling and of sound sense as to complain that Fortune has brought mourning upon any man, when he shall know that she has coveted the tears even of the Caesars.

The deified Augustus lost Octavia, his dearest sister, and not even from him, for whom she had destined heaven, did Nature take away the necessity of mourning; nay rather, that same man, harassed by every kind of bereavement, lost his sister's son, who had been prepared for the succession to his power; in short—not to enumerate his griefs one by one—he lost both sons-in-law and children and grandchildren, and no one of all mortals felt more that he was a man, while he was among men. Yet his breast, most capacious of all things, took in so many and so great sorrows, and the deified Augustus was victor not only over foreign nations but over his griefs as well.

Gaius Caesar, the great-grandson of the deified Augustus, my great-uncle, in about the first years of his youth lost his most beloved brother Lucius—himself the prince of the youth, and his brother the prince of the same youth—amid the preparations for the Parthian war, and was wounded much more grievously in mind than he was afterward struck in body; both of which he bore at once most dutifully and most bravely.

Tiberius Caesar, my uncle, lost Drusus Germanicus, my father, a brother younger than himself, while he was laying open the heart of Germany and bringing the fiercest nations under the Roman empire—lost him in his very embrace, and amid his kisses. Yet he set a limit to mourning, not only for himself but for others as well, and the whole army, not merely grieving but stunned, when it claimed for itself the body of his Drusus, he brought back to the manner of Roman mourning, and judged that not only the discipline of soldiering but also of grieving must be preserved. He could not have checked the tears of others, had he not first restrained his own.

Marcus Antonius, my grandfather, second to no man save the one by whom he was conquered, at the time when he was setting the commonwealth in order and, endowed with triumviral power, saw nothing above himself, and—save for his two colleagues—beheld all things beneath him, heard that his brother had been slain.

O unbridled Fortune, what sport you make for yourself out of the woes of men! At the very time when Marcus Antonius sat as arbiter of the life and death of his fellow citizens, the brother of Marcus Antonius was being led to execution! Yet Marcus Antonius bore this grievous wound with the same greatness of soul with which he had endured all other adversities; and this was his manner of mourning—to make funeral offering to his brother with the blood of twenty legions.

But to pass over all other examples, to be silent about other deaths in my own case too: twice has Fortune assailed me with a brother's loss, twice has she learned that I can be hurt but cannot be conquered. I lost my brother Germanicus; and how I loved him, surely everyone understands who reflects how loving brothers love their brothers; yet I so governed my feeling that I neither left undone anything that ought to be required of a good brother, nor did anything that could be blamed in a prince."

Imagine, then, that the father of his country recounts to you these examples, and that the same man shows how nothing is sacred and untouched by Fortune, who has dared to lead forth funerals from those very household shrines from which she was to seek gods. Let no one, then, marvel that anything is done by her either cruelly or unjustly; for can she know any fairness or any restraint toward private houses, she whose implacable savagery has so often made mourning of the very couches of the gods?

Though we heap reproach upon her, not only with our own lips but with the lips of all men, she will nevertheless not be changed; against all prayers and all complaints she will hold her course. This is what Fortune has been in human affairs, this is what she will be. She has left nothing unattempted by herself, she will leave nothing untouched; she will go more violently through all things, as she has ever been wont, daring to enter even those houses, for the sake of doing wrong, to which men come through temples, and she will clothe in black raiment doors decked with laurel.

Let us obtain from her this one thing by public vows and prayers—if she has not yet resolved to make an end of the human race, if she still looks with favour upon the Roman name: that this prince, given to the fallen affairs of men, may be sacred to her, as he is to all mortals! Let her learn clemency from him, and become gentle toward the gentlest of all princes!"

You ought, therefore, to look upon all those men whom I have just now mentioned, either taken up into heaven or near to it, and to bear with an even mind that Fortune stretches out her hands toward you also, hands which she does not withhold even from those by whom we swear; you ought to imitate the firmness of those men in enduring and overcoming griefs, so far indeed as is permitted to a man to walk in the footsteps of the divine. However great

the distinctions of rank and of nobility may be in other things, virtue is set in the midst, open to all; she scorns no one who only judges himself worthy of her. Certainly you will best imitate those men who, though they might have been indignant that they themselves were not exempt from this evil, nevertheless judged that to be made equal in this one thing to the rest of mankind was not a wrong but the law of mortality, and who bore what had befallen them neither too bitterly and harshly, nor weakly and effeminately; for not to feel one's own ills is not human, and not to bear them is not manly.

Yet I cannot, now that I have gone round all the Caesars from whom Fortune snatched away brothers and sisters, pass over this one, who must be set apart from the whole company of the Caesars—him whom Nature brought forth for the destruction and reproach of the human race, by whom the empire was scorched and utterly overthrown, and which now the clemency of the gentlest of princes restores.

Gaius Caesar, when he had lost his sister Drusilla—that man who could no more grieve than rejoice in a princely fashion—fled the sight and society of his fellow citizens, was not present at his sister's obsequies, paid his sister no funeral rites, but at his villa at Alba relieved the woes of that most bitter funeral with dice and gaming-board and other diversions of this common sort. For shame upon the empire! That dice should be the solace of a Roman prince mourning his sister!

That same Gaius, with frenzied inconstancy now letting his beard and hair grow long, now cutting them, wandering and roaming over the coasts of Italy and Sicily, and never quite certain whether he wished his sister to be mourned or worshipped, during all the same time in which he was setting up temples and sacred couches to her, was visiting with most cruel punishment those who had been too little grieved; for with the same lack of self-control he bore the blows of adversity with which, lifted up by the outcome of prosperity, he had swollen beyond human measure.

Far from every Roman man be this example—either to draw off his grief by untimely sports, or to provoke it by the foulness of squalor and unkemptness, or to assault others' woes with a solace utterly inhuman.

You, however, need change nothing of your accustomed way, since indeed you have set yourself to love those studies which both best exalt good fortune and most easily lessen calamity, and which are at once a man's greatest adornments and his solaces. Now, therefore, plunge yourself more deeply into your studies; now set them about you as it were defences for the mind, that grief may find no entrance into any part of you.

Carry on your brother's memory also by some monument of your writings; for this is the one work, in human affairs, that no tempest can harm, that no length of time can consume. All other things, which consist of heaped-up stones and masses of marble or mounds of earth raised to a great height, do not prolong their day far, since they too perish; but the memory of genius is immortal. This bestow upon your brother, in this set him; you will the better consecrate him with a genius destined ever to endure than mourn him with fruitless grief.

As for Fortune herself, even though her case cannot now be pleaded before you—for all those gifts she gave us are hateful for this very reason, that she has snatched something away—yet it will have to be pleaded then, as soon as time has made you a fairer judge of her; for then you will be able to return to her favour. For she has provided many things by which to make amends for this wrong, and she will yet give many more by which to redeem it; in short, this very thing she has taken away, she herself had given you.

Do not, then, use your genius against yourself, do not lend aid to your own grief. Your eloquence is indeed able to make small things pass for great, and again to belittle great things and reduce them to the least; but let it keep these powers of its for another time, and now bring its whole self to bear upon your comfort. And yet consider whether even this itself be not already superfluous; for Nature demands something of us, but more is brought on by vanity.

Never, however, will I require of you that you should not grieve at all. And I know that there are certain men to be found, of a hard rather than a brave wisdom, who deny that the wise man will grieve. These men, it seems to me, have never fallen into a case of this kind; otherwise Fortune would have shaken their proud wisdom out of them, and would have driven them, even against their will, to the confession of the truth.

Reason will have done enough if it cuts away from grief only that which is excessive and overflows; that there should be none of it at all is neither to be hoped nor desired by any man. Rather let it keep that measure which copies neither lack of natural feeling nor madness, and holds us in that state which is the mark of a mind both loving and not unhinged. Let the tears flow, but let them also cease; let groans be drawn from the depth of the breast, but let them also have an end; so govern your mind that you may win the approval both of wise men and of brothers.

Bring it about that you may often wish your brother's memory to come before you, that you may both celebrate him in conversation and keep him present to yourself by constant recollection—which you will succeed in doing only if you make his memory delightful to you rather than tearful; for it is natural that the mind should always flee from that to which it returns with sorrow.

Reflect upon his modesty, reflect upon his shrewdness in carrying matters through, his diligence in completing them, his constancy in keeping his promises. Set forth all his sayings and deeds both to others and to your own self. Reflect what he was, and what he might have been hoped to be. For what could not have been safely pledged of such a brother?

These things, as best I could, I have composed with a mind now dulled and blunted by long disuse. If they shall seem either to answer too little to your genius or to heal your grief too little, reflect how he cannot be free to console another whom his own ills hold fast in their grip, and how Latin words do not readily come to a man around whom resounds the rude din of barbarians, grievous even to the more civilized among the barbarians.