Letter 99

The letter which I wrote to Marullus, when he had lost his little son and was said to be bearing it weakly, I have sent to you; in it I did not follow the usual custom, nor did I think that he ought to be handled gently, since he was more worthy of rebuke than of consolation. For to one stricken and bearing ill a great wound, one must yield for a little while; let him sate himself, or at least pour out the first onset; but those who have taken upon themselves to mourn should be chastised at once, and learn that there are certain follies even in tears.

Do you expect consolations? Take reproaches instead. You bear the death of your son weakly; what would you do if you had lost a friend? A son of uncertain hope has died, a little one; a tiny span of time has perished.

We hunt up causes of grief, and we wish to complain even unjustly of fortune, as though she would not give us just causes of complaint. But, by Hercules, you seemed to me already to have spirit enough even against solid evils, much more against those shadows of evils over which men groan for custom's sake. The greatest of all losses, the loss of a friend, you should have so borne that you rejoiced more that you had had him than mourned that you had lost him.

But most men do not reckon how much they have received, how much they have rejoiced. This grief of yours has, among its other evils, this: it is not only superfluous, but ungrateful. Therefore, because you had such a friend, has your trouble perished? In so many years, in so close a union of life, in so familiar a fellowship of studies, was nothing accomplished? Do you bury friendship along with your friend? And why do you grieve to have lost him, if it does no good to have had him? Believe me, a great part of those whom we have loved, though chance has taken the men themselves, remains with us. The time that is past is ours, and nothing is in a safer place than what has been.

We are ungrateful for what we have received through hope of the future, as though what is to come, if only it shall fall to us, will not quickly pass into the past. He narrowly bounds the enjoyment of things who is glad only in the present; both the future and the past delight, the one by expectation, the other by memory, but the one hangs in doubt and may not happen, the other cannot but have been. What madness, then, is it to let the surest thing slip from us? Let us rest in those things which we have already drunk in, if only we drank them not with a leaking mind, that let through whatever it had received.

Countless are the examples of those who have buried young children without tears, who have come back from the pyre to the senate or to some public office and at once done other business. And not without reason; for first it is superfluous to grieve, if by grieving you accomplish nothing. Then it is unjust to complain of that which befell one and awaits all. Then the complaint of longing is foolish, where there is the least difference between the lost and the one who longs. For this reason we ought to be of an even mind, that we follow those whom we have lost.

Look at the swiftness of most rapid time, think of the brevity of this span through which we run at full speed, observe this company of the human race tending the same way, marked off by the smallest intervals, even where they seem greatest; he whom you think to have perished has only been sent on before. And what is more mad than, when the same road must be measured out by you, to weep for one who has gone before?

Does anyone weep for a thing done which he did not know would be done? Or, if he did not consider death in a man, he has deceived himself. Does anyone weep for a thing done which he used to say could not but be done? Whoever complains that someone has died, complains that he was a man. The same condition has bound us all: whoever is born is destined to die.

We are distinguished by intervals, we are made equal at the exit. This which lies between the first day and the last is various and uncertain: if you reckon the troubles, it is long even for a boy, if the swiftness, narrow even for an old man. There is nothing not slippery and deceptive and more shifting than any weather. But the boy has died. I do not yet say it goes better with him who has quickly departed; let us turn to him who has grown old. By how little does he surpass the infant!

By how little does he surpass the infant! Set before yourself the vastness of deep time and embrace the universe, then compare with the immense this which we call human age; you will see how scanty is that which we wish for, which we strain after. Of this how much do tears, how much do anxieties occupy!

How much does death, wished for before it comes, how much ill health, how much fear! How much do the years either raw or useless hold! Half of it is slept away. Add toils, griefs, perils, and you will understand that even in the longest life the very least is what is lived.

But who will grant you that it does not go better with him who is allowed to return quickly, for whom the journey was finished before weariness? Life is neither a good nor an evil; it is the place of good and evil. Thus he has lost nothing but a throw of the dice that more surely tended to loss. He might have turned out modest and prudent, he might under your care have been shaped to better things, but, what is more justly feared, he might have become like the many.

Look at those young men whom luxury has flung from the noblest houses into the arena; look at those who, mutually shameless, practise their own lust and another's, of whom no day goes by without drunkenness, none without some notable scandal; it will be plain that more could have been feared than hoped. You ought not, therefore, to summon up causes of grief, nor to heap up light troubles by being indignant at them.

I do not exhort you to strive and rise; I do not judge so ill of you as to think that against this you must call up your whole virtue. This is not grief, but a sting; you yourself make it grief. Without doubt philosophy has profited you much, if you long with a brave mind for a boy still better known to his nurse than to his father.

What? Do I now counsel hardness, and wish the face to be rigid at the very funeral, and not even suffer the mind to be contracted? By no means. That is inhumanity, not virtue, to behold the funerals of one's own with the same eyes as the men themselves, and not to be moved at the first tearing away of one's dear ones. But suppose I should forbid it; some things are in their own right. Tears fall even from those who hold them back, and, poured out, relieve the mind.

What then? Let us allow them to fall, let us not command it; let as much flow as feeling has cast forth, not as much as imitation demands. But let us add nothing to our grief, nor swell it after another's example. The display of grief demands more than grief: how few are sad for their own sakes! They groan more loudly when they are heard, and, silent and quiet while in private, when they have seen anyone, are roused to fresh weeping. Then they lay their hands upon their head, which they could have done more freely with no one forbidding; then they pray for death for themselves, then they roll about on their couch; without a spectator grief ceases.

This fault follows us, as in other things, so in this too, to be shaped to the example of the many, and to look not at what is fitting, but at what is customary. We depart from nature, we give ourselves over to the crowd, the author of nothing good, and in this matter as in others most fickle. It sees someone bearing his grief bravely: it calls him impious and savage; it sees someone collapsing and flung upon the body: it says he is effeminate and unmanned.

All things, therefore, must be recalled to reason. But nothing is more foolish than to court a reputation for sadness and to give approval to tears, which I judge in a wise man fall sometimes by permission, sometimes by their own force. I will say what the difference is. When the first news of a bitter death has struck us, when we hold the body about to pass from our embrace into the fire, natural necessity wrings out tears, and the breath, struck by the blow of grief, as it shakes the whole body, so shakes the eyes too, from which it presses out and expels the moisture lying near.

These tears fall by compulsion, against our will; others are those to which we give vent, when the memory of those we have lost is gone over again. And there is something sweet in sadness, when there come to mind their pleasant talk, their cheerful company, their dutiful affection; then the eyes are relaxed as though in joy. To these we yield, by those we are overcome.

There is no reason, therefore, why you should hold back tears before a bystanding company, nor pour them out; whether you weep or do not weep, both are base; let us be ruled by nature, gravity preserved. I have seen men reverend at the funerals of their own, in whose faces love stood out, with every theatricality of mourners removed; there was nothing but what was given to true feeling.

There is a certain comeliness even in grieving; this the wise man must preserve, and, as in other things, so in tears too there is a measure that is enough; with the imprudent both their joys and their griefs overflow.

Receive necessary things with an even mind. What incredible thing, what new thing has happened? For how many, at this very moment, is a funeral being arranged, for how many are grave-clothes being bought, how many mourn after your mourning! As often as you have thought that he was a boy, think too that he was a man, to whom nothing certain is promised, whom fortune does not at all events lead to old age; she dismisses him whence she pleases.

For the rest, speak of him often and celebrate his memory as much as you can. This will return to you the more often, if it comes without bitterness; for no one gladly dwells with one who is sad, much less with sadness. Whatever words of his, whatever jests, though boyish, gave you pleasure, hear again and again. That he could have fulfilled your hopes and the wish of a father, boldly affirm.

To forget one's own and to bury their memory along with their bodies, and to weep most lavishly but to remember most sparingly, is the mark of an inhuman mind. So do birds, so do beasts love their young, whose love is keen and almost mad, but, when they have lost them, is wholly quenched. This does not become a prudent man; let him continue to remember, let him cease to mourn.

I by no means approve what Metrodorus says, that there is a certain pleasure akin to sadness, and that this must be hunted after at such a time. I have set down the very words of Metrodorus, from the book of the letters of Metrodorus to his sister.

Of which I do not doubt what you will think. For what is baser than to court pleasure in grief itself, nay through grief, and to seek even among tears for what may please? These are the men who reproach us with too much rigour and defame our precepts of hardness, because we say that grief should either not be admitted into the mind or quickly thrust out.

What we prescribe is honourable: when feeling has poured out some tears and, so to say, foamed itself off, the mind should not be given over to grief. What, do you say that pleasure should be mingled with grief itself? So we comfort children with a sweet cake, so we check the weeping of infants by pouring in milk. Not even at that time when your son is burning or your friend is breathing his last do you suffer pleasure to cease, but wish to tickle grief itself? Which is the more honourable, to remove grief from the mind, or to admit pleasure even to grief? Admit, do I say? It is hunted after, and that out of grief itself.

'There is,' he says, 'a certain pleasure akin to sadness.' That we may say, you indeed may not. You know one good, pleasure, one evil, pain; what kinship can there be between good and evil? But suppose there is; is it now, of all times, that it is dug out? And do we examine grief itself to see whether there is anything pleasant and delightful beside it?

Certain remedies, wholesome for some parts of the body, cannot be applied to others as foul and unseemly, and what elsewhere would profit without harm to modesty becomes dishonourable on the place of a wound. Are you not ashamed to cure grief with pleasure? That stroke must be treated more severely. Admonish him rather of this, that no sense of evil reaches him who has perished; for if it reaches him, he has not perished.

Nothing, I say, harms him who is nothing; he lives, if he is harmed. Do you think it goes ill with him because he is nothing, or because he still is someone? And yet there can be no torment to him from the fact that he is not; for who that has no sensation can feel anything? Nor from the fact that he is; for he has escaped the greatest drawback of death, namely, not to be.

Let us say this too to him who weeps and longs for one snatched away in earliest age: all of us, as concerns the brevity of life, if you compare it with the universe, both young and old, are on a level. For less comes to us out of all our age than what one would call the least, since indeed the least is at any rate some part. This which we live is next to nothing; and yet, O our madness, it is spread out broadly.

These things I have written to you, not as though you would await a remedy so late, for it is clear to me that you have said to yourself whatever you are about to read, but that I might chide that small delay in which you withdrew from yourself, and might exhort you for the rest, that you raise your spirit against fortune and foresee all her weapons, not as though they might come, but as though they were certainly going to come. Farewell.