Often, best of mothers, I have taken up the impulse to console you, often I have checked it. Many things urged me to dare it: first, I seemed about to lay down all my own troubles, once I had at least wiped away your tears for the moment, even if I could not stop them; next, I did not doubt I should have more authority to rouse you, if I had first risen myself; besides, I feared that Fortune, beaten by me, might beat someone of mine. So, as best I could, with my hand laid over my own wound, I crawled to bind up yours. 2. This purpose of mine there were things, again, to delay: I knew your grief, while it raged fresh, must not be met, lest the consolations themselves provoke and inflame it — for in sicknesses too nothing is more ruinous than premature medicine; so I waited until it should break its own strength and, softened by delay to bear remedies, suffer itself to be touched and handled. Besides, when I unrolled all the monuments of the most illustrious minds, composed to curb and govern grief, I found no example of one who consoled his own when he himself was being mourned by them; so in a case so new I hesitated, and feared that this would be no consolation but a tearing-open of the wound. 3. And what of this — that a man lifting his head from the very pyre to console his own needed new words, not drawn from common and everyday address? But every greatness of grief that exceeds measure must of necessity snatch away the choice of words, since it often chokes the very voice. 4. Yet somehow I will strain at it — not from confidence in my talent, but because I, the consoler, can stand for the most effective consolation. You who would deny him nothing, I hope you will at least not deny him this: that, though all mourning is stubborn, you will be willing to have a limit set by me to your longing.

See how much I have promised myself of your indulgence: I do not doubt I shall be more powerful with you than your grief, than which nothing is more powerful with the wretched. So, that I may not close with it at once, I will first stand by it and heap up the things by which it is roused; I will bring out and reopen all that has already healed over. 2. Someone will say: "What kind of consoling is this, to call back evils blotted out and to set the mind in sight of all its troubles, when it can scarcely bear one?" But let him consider that whatever things are so ruinous that they have grown strong against the remedy are generally cured by their contraries. So I will bring to it all its mournings, all its emblems of grief: this will be to heal not by a soft road, but by cautery and the knife. What shall I gain? That a mind, victor over so many miseries, should be ashamed to take hard one wound in a body so scarred. 3. Let those weep longer and groan whose soft minds long prosperity has unstrung, and who collapse at the stirrings of the lightest injuries; but let those whose every year has passed through calamities bear even the heaviest with a brave and unmoved constancy. Unbroken misfortune has this one good, that those it ever harasses it hardens at last. 4. Fortune has given you no respite from the heaviest mournings; she did not even except your birthday: you lost your mother the moment you were born — nay, while you were being born — and were in a manner exposed to life. You grew up under a stepmother, whom by all obedience and devotion, as much as can be seen even in a daughter, you forced to become a mother; yet even a good stepmother costs everyone dear. Your most indulgent uncle, the best and bravest of men, you lost while you were awaiting his arrival; and, lest Fortune make her cruelty lighter by spreading it, within thirty days you buried your dearest husband, by whom you were the mother of three children. 5. This mourning was announced to you while you were already mourning, and with all your children absent, as though your evils had been flung of set purpose into that time so that there should be no place where your grief might lean. I pass over so many dangers, so many fears, which without interval you bore as they rushed upon you: only now, into the same lap from which you had sent forth three grandchildren, you have taken back the bones of three grandchildren; within twenty days of burying my son, dead in your hands and amid your kisses, you heard that I was snatched away: this still was lacking to you, to mourn the living.

The heaviest of all the wounds that ever went down into your body is the recent one, I admit; it did not break the surface of the skin, but split the breast and the very vitals. But as raw recruits, lightly hurt, still cry out and dread the hands of surgeons more than the steel, while veterans, however run through, patiently and without a groan let their wounds be cleansed as though they were another’s body, so you now must offer yourself bravely to the cure. 2. Away with the lamentations and the wailings and the other things by which a woman’s grief commonly riots; for you have wasted so many evils, if you have not yet learned to be wretched. Do I seem to have dealt with you not timidly? I have withdrawn nothing from your evils, but have piled them all up and set them before you.

I did this with a great spirit; for I resolved to conquer your grief, not to circumvent it. And I shall conquer it, I think, first if I show that I suffer nothing for which I myself can be called wretched, much less anything for which I make wretched even those I touch; then if I pass to you and prove that not even your fortune, which hangs wholly on mine, is heavy. 2. This I will approach first, which your love is eager to hear: that nothing is wrong with me. If I can, I will make it plain that the very things by which you think me pressed are not unbearable; but if that cannot be believed, at least I shall be the better pleased with myself, that I am happy amid the things that commonly make men wretched. 3. There is no reason to believe others about me: I myself, that you be not troubled by uncertain reports, tell you that I am not wretched. To make you more secure, I will add that I cannot even be made wretched.

We are born on good terms, if we do not desert them. Nature meant that for living well no great equipment should be needed: each can make himself happy. Light is the weight in adventitious things, with no great force either way: neither do prosperous things lift the wise man up, nor adverse cast him down; for he has labored always to put the most in himself, to seek all joy from himself. 2. What then? Do I call myself wise? By no means; for if I could profess that, I should not only deny that I am wretched, but proclaim myself the most fortunate of all and brought near to god: as it is, what is enough to soften all miseries, I have given myself to wise men, and, not yet strong enough for my own aid, I have fled into another’s camp — of those, that is, who easily protect themselves and their own. 3. They have ordered me to stand assiduously, as though set on guard, and to foresee all the attempts of Fortune, all her assaults, long before they rush in. She falls heavy on those to whom she is sudden: he bears her easily who always expects her. For the coming of the enemy too overthrows those whom it has caught unawares; but those who have prepared for the war before the war, ordered and fitted, easily take the first blow, which is the most tumultuous. 4. Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to be keeping peace; all those things she bestowed on me most indulgently — money, honors, influence — I placed where she could take them back without disturbance of mine. I kept a wide interval between them and me; so she has carried them off, not torn them away. Adverse fortune crushes no one but him whom prosperous fortune has deceived. 5. Those who loved her gifts as their own and lasting, who wished to be admired for them, lie low and mourn when these vain and childish minds, ignorant of all solid pleasure, are forsaken by their false and shifting delights; but the man who has not been puffed up by glad things is not contracted when they change. Against either state he holds an unconquered mind of proven firmness; for in prosperity itself he has tested what he could do against adversity. 6. So I have always judged that in those things all men pray for there is nothing of true good, and then I have found them empty and smeared over with a specious and deceiving paint, with nothing within resembling their front: now in these things that are called evils I find nothing so terrible and hard as the opinion of the crowd threatened. The very word, indeed, by a kind of persuasion and consensus, comes harsher to the ears, and strikes the hearer as something sad and accursed: for so the people have decreed, but the people’s decrees the wise in great part annul.

Setting aside, then, the judgment of the many, whom the first look of things, however believed, carries off, let us see what exile is. Plainly a change of place. That I may not seem to narrow its force and withdraw whatever worst it holds, this change of place is followed by discomforts: poverty, disgrace, contempt. Against these I will contend later: meanwhile I wish first to look at what bitterness the mere change of place brings. 2. "To be without one’s country is unbearable." Look, come now, at this throng, for which the roofs of an immense city scarcely suffice: the greatest part of that crowd is without a country. From their towns and colonies, from the whole world in short, they have flowed together: some ambition has brought, some the necessity of a public office, some an imposed embassy, some luxury seeking a place opportune and rich for its vices, some the desire of liberal studies, some the shows; some friendship has drawn, some industry, finding a wide field to display its worth; some have brought beauty for sale, some eloquence for sale. 3. No kind of men has failed to run together into the city, which sets great prices on both virtues and vices. Bid them all be called by name and ask each "from what home" he is: you will see that the greater part have left their own seats and come to a city indeed the greatest and most beautiful, yet not their own. 4. Then leave this city, which can be called as it were the common one, and go round all the cities: there is none that does not have a great part of its multitude foreign. Pass from those whose pleasant situation and convenience of region draws more, and survey the deserted places and the harshest islands — Sciathos and Seriphos, Gyara and Cossura: you will find no place of exile in which someone does not linger for his pleasure. 5. What can be found so bare, so sheer on every side, as this rock? What scantier, if you look to resources? What more savage, as to its people? What more forbidding, as to the very lie of the place? What more intemperate, as to the nature of its climate? Yet more foreigners than citizens settle here. So far, then, is the mere change of place from being heavy, that even this place has drawn some from their country. 6. I find those who say there is in minds a certain natural itch to change their seats and shift their dwellings; for a mobile and restless mind was given to man, nowhere holding itself, scattering itself, sending its thoughts into all things known and unknown, wandering, impatient of rest, and most gladdened by novelty. 7. At which you will not wonder, if you look at its first origin: it is not compacted of an earthen and heavy body, it came down from that heavenly breath; and the nature of heavenly things is ever in motion, it flees and is driven on by the swiftest course. Look at the stars that light the world: not one of them stands still. The sun glides ceaselessly and changes place from place, and, though it is turned with the universe, is nonetheless carried in the contrary direction to the world itself, runs through all the parts of the zodiac, never halts; its motion is perpetual, and its migration from place to place. 8. All things roll always and are in transit; as law and the necessity of nature has ordained, they are borne from one place to another; when through fixed spaces of years they have unwound their circuits, they will go again through what they came: go now and suppose the human mind, composed of the same seeds as the divine, takes its transit and migration hard, when god’s nature finds either delight or preservation in continual and most rapid change.

Come now, turn yourself from the heavenly to the human: you will see whole nations and peoples have changed their seat. What do Greek cities mean in the midst of barbarian regions? Why the Macedonian tongue among Indians and Persians? Scythia and that whole tract of wild and untamed nations displays cities of Achaea planted on Pontic shores: neither the savagery of perpetual winter, nor the temper of men bristling to match their own sky, stood in the way of those transferring their homes. 2. There is an Athenian crowd in Asia; Miletus has poured out the population of seventy-five cities in all directions; the whole side of Italy washed by the lower sea was Greater Greece. Asia claims the Tuscans for her own; Tyrians inhabit Africa, Carthaginians Spain; Greeks thrust themselves into Gaul, Gauls into Greece; the Pyrenees did not check the passage of the Germans — through the trackless, through the unknown, human fickleness has ranged. 3. They dragged along children and wives and parents heavy with age. Some, tossed by long wandering, did not choose a place by judgment but seized the nearest out of weariness; others made themselves a right in a foreign land by arms; some nations, while they sought the unknown, the sea swallowed; some settled where the want of all things set them down. 4. Nor had all the same cause for leaving and seeking a country: some the destruction of their cities by hostile arms drove out, escaped into others’ lands and stripped of their own; some domestic sedition removed; some the excessive crowding of an overflowing population sent out to unburden its strength; some plague or frequent gapings of the earth or some intolerable defects of an unhappy soil expelled; some the fame of a fertile and over-praised coast corrupted. 5. One cause stirred some from their homes, another others: this at least is clear, that nothing has stayed in the same place where it was born. The running-about of the human race is constant; daily something is changed in so great a world: new foundations of cities are laid, new names of nations arise, the former ones extinguished or turned into the increase of a stronger. But all those transportations of peoples — what else are they than public exiles? 6. Why do I drag you through so long a circuit? What does it matter to enumerate Antenor, founder of Padua, and Evander settling the kingdom of the Arcadians on the bank of the Tiber? Why Diomedes and the others whom the Trojan war, conquered and conquerors alike, scattered through foreign lands? 7. The Roman empire, indeed, looks back to an exile as its founder, whom — a fugitive, his country captured, dragging a slender remnant — necessity and the fear of the victor, seeking distant places, brought down into Italy. This people then, how many colonies has it sent into every province! Wherever a Roman has conquered, he dwells. To this change of place they gladly gave their names, and the old man, leaving his own altars, followed the colonists across the seas. 8. The matter, indeed, does not require the enumeration of more; yet one I will add that thrusts itself upon the eyes: this very island has often already changed its settlers. To pass over the older things, which age has covered, the Greeks who now inhabit Massilia, leaving Phocis, first settled in this island, from which what drove them is uncertain — whether the heaviness of the sky, or the sight of all-powerful Italy, or the nature of a harborless sea; for that the wildness of the neighbors was not the cause appears from this, that they then set themselves among the fiercest and most disordered peoples of Gaul. 9. The Ligurians then crossed over into it, the Spaniards too crossed over, as appears from the likeness of custom; for there are the same head-coverings and the same kind of footwear as the Cantabrians have, and certain words; for the whole language, by intercourse with Greeks and Ligurians, has fallen away from the native. Then two colonies of Roman citizens were settled, one by Marius, the other by Sulla: so many times has the people of this dry and thorny rock been changed! 10. You will scarcely, in the end, find any land that even now natives inhabit; all is mixed and grafted. One has succeeded another: this man coveted what was loathsome to that; that man was cast out from where he had expelled another. So it has pleased fate, that the fortune of nothing should stand always in the same place.

Against the change of place itself, the other discomforts that cling to exile set aside, Varro, the most learned of the Romans, thinks this remedy enough: that wherever we come, we must use the same nature of things; Marcus Brutus thinks this enough: that those going into exile may take their own virtues with them. 2. Even if someone judges these singly too little effective to console an exile, he will admit that the two, brought together into one, can do the most. For how very little it is that we lose! The two fairest things will follow us wherever we move: the common nature and our own virtue. 3. This was brought about, believe me, by him, whoever was the framer of the universe — whether he is a god powerful over all, or incorporeal reason the artificer of vast works, or a divine breath diffused through all things great and least with equal tension, or fate and an immutable series of causes cohering with one another — this, I say, was brought about, that into another’s power nothing should fall but the cheapest things. 4. Whatever is best for man lies outside human power, and can neither be given nor snatched away. This world, than which the nature of things has begotten nothing greater or more adorned, and the mind that contemplates and admires the world, its most magnificent part, are our own and perpetual, and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. 5. So, eager and erect, let us hasten with intrepid step wherever the matter has carried us, let us traverse whatever lands: no place of exile can be found within the world; for nothing that is within the world is foreign to man. From whatever point the gaze is raised to heaven on equal terms, all things divine are distant from all things human by equal intervals. 6. Therefore, so long as my eyes are not led away from that spectacle of which they are insatiable, so long as it is permitted me to gaze on the sun and moon, to cling to the other stars, to investigate their risings and settings and intervals and the causes of their swifter or slower wandering, to watch so many stars glittering through the night, some fixed, others not going out into great space but turning about within their own track, some bursting out suddenly, some dazzling the sight with poured fire as though they fell, or flying past with a long trail and much light — so long as I am with these and, as far as is right for a man, mingle with the heavenly things, so long as I keep my mind, straining toward the sight of its kindred things, ever on high: what does it matter what I tread on?

"But this land is not fruitful in fruit-bearing or pleasant trees; it is not watered by the channels of great and navigable rivers; it bears nothing that other nations seek, barely fertile enough for the keeping of its inhabitants; no precious stone is quarried here, no veins of gold and silver are dug out." 2. Narrow is the mind that earthly things delight: it must be led away to those that appear everywhere alike, everywhere alike shine. And this must be thought on, that those earthly things stand in the way of true goods through false ones wrongly believed. The longer men run out their colonnades, the higher they raise their towers, the wider they stretch their walks, the deeper they dig their summer grottoes, the greater the pile by which they heave up the roofs of their dining-halls, the more there will be to hide heaven from them. 3. Into a region chance has cast you in which the most splendid shelter is a hut: surely you are of a paltry spirit and one consoling itself meanly, if you bear it bravely only because you know the hut of Romulus. Say this rather: "This humble cabin, surely, receives the virtues? It will at once be more beautiful than any temple, when justice is seen there, when self-command, when prudence, devotion, the reason of rightly dispensing all duties, the knowledge of things human and divine. No place is narrow that holds this throng of so great virtues; no exile is heavy into which one may go with this company." 4. Brutus, in the book he composed on virtue, says that he saw Marcellus living in exile at Mytilene, and living as happily as the nature of man could allow, and never more eager for the good arts than at that time. And so he adds that it seemed to him rather that he himself was going into exile, who was to return without Marcellus, than that Marcellus was being left in exile. 5. O more fortunate Marcellus at the time when he won Brutus’s approval for his exile than when he won the consulship for the commonwealth! How great a man was he who brought it about that someone seemed to himself an exile because he was departing from an exile! How great a man who drew into admiration of himself a man to be admired even by his own Cato! 6. The same Brutus says that Gaius Caesar sailed past Mytilene because he could not bear to see the disfigured man. The senate indeed obtained his return by public prayers, so anxious and sorrowful that all on that day seemed to have Brutus’s mind and to plead not for Marcellus but for themselves, lest they be exiles if they were without him; but he gained far more on the day when Brutus could not leave him an exile, nor Caesar see him one. For he won the testimony of both: Brutus grieved to return without Marcellus, Caesar blushed. 7. Do you doubt that so great a man often exhorted himself thus to bear his exile with an even mind: "That you are without your country is no misery: you have so steeped yourself in disciplines that you know every place to be a country to the wise man. And further? This man who expelled you — was he not himself without his country for ten continuous years? for the sake of extending the empire, no doubt; but without it he was nonetheless. 8. Now, see, Africa draws him to itself, full of the threats of a reviving war; Spain draws him, which warms again the broken and afflicted party; faithless Egypt draws him; the whole world, in short, which is intent on the chance of a shaken empire: which thing will he meet first? against which part will he set himself? His own victory will drive him through all lands. Let the nations look up to him and revere him: live you content with Brutus for your admirer."

Well, then, did Marcellus bear his exile, and the change of place changed nothing in his mind, although poverty followed it; and that there is no evil in poverty, anyone understands who has not yet come into the madness of an avarice and luxury that overturns everything. For how very little it is that is needful for a man’s keeping! and to whom can it be lacking who has any virtue at all? 2. So far as concerns me, I understand that I have lost not riches but occupations. The body’s wants are slight: it wants the cold driven off, hunger and thirst quenched with food; whatever is craved beyond that, the toil is for our vices, not our needs. There is no need to ransack every deep, nor to load the belly with the slaughter of animals, nor to dig up shellfish from the unknown shore of the farthest sea: may the gods and goddesses destroy those whose luxury oversteps the bounds of an empire already so envied! 3. They want game caught beyond the Phasis to furnish a showy kitchen, and are not ashamed to fetch birds from the Parthians, from whom we have not yet exacted our penalties. From everywhere they cart in everything known to a fastidious gullet; what a stomach unstrung by delicacies will scarcely admit is carried from the farthest ocean: they vomit that they may eat, they eat that they may vomit, and the banquets they hunt down across the whole world they do not even deign to digest. 4. Gaius Caesar — whom, it seems to me, the nature of things brought forth to show what the highest vices can do amid the highest fortune — dined on ten million sesterces in a single day; and, helped in this by everyone’s ingenuity, he still scarcely found how the tribute of three provinces might be made into one dinner. 5. O wretched men, whose palate is not roused except to costly foods! And what makes them costly is not some surpassing savor or sweetness in the throat, but their rarity and the difficulty of procuring them. Otherwise, if it pleased them to return to a sound mind, what need is there of so many arts in service to the belly? what of trading voyages? what of the laying-waste of forests? what of the ransacking of the deep? On every side lie the foods that the nature of things has set out in all places; but these men pass them by as though blind, and range through every region, cross seas, and, when they could settle their hunger with little, provoke it at great cost. 6. One would like to say: "Why do you launch ships? Why do you arm your hands against beasts and against men? Why do you rush about with such uproar? Why do you heap riches upon riches? Will you not consider how small your bodies are? Is it not madness and the utmost error of minds, when you can hold so little, to desire much? Though you swell your fortunes and push out your boundaries, never will you enlarge your bodies. When your business has gone well, when your campaigns have brought in much, when foods tracked down from everywhere have come together, you will have nowhere to stow these provisions of yours. 7. Why do you hunt down so many things?" No doubt our forefathers, whose virtue even now props up our vices, were unhappy men — who prepared their food with their own hands, whose bed was the earth, whose roofs did not yet gleam with gold, whose temples did not yet glitter with gems; and so in those days men swore religiously by gods of clay: those who had called them to witness went back to the enemy, to die, rather than break faith. 8. No doubt our dictator lived less blessedly — he who heard the Samnite envoys while he himself turned the cheapest food over the fire with his own hand, the hand with which he had already often struck the enemy and laid the laurel in the lap of Capitoline Jupiter — than Apicius lived within our own memory, who in that city from which philosophers were once ordered to depart as corrupters of the young, professing the science of the cook-shop, infected the age with his teaching. His end is worth knowing. 9. When he had flung a hundred million sesterces into his kitchen, when he had drained so many imperial bounties and the huge revenue of the Capitol in single carousals, crushed by debt he was at last forced to look into his accounts: he reckoned that ten million sesterces would be left to him, and, as though he would live in the last extremity of starvation if he lived on ten million, he ended his life by poison. 10. How great was the luxury for which ten million sesterces was destitution! Go now and suppose that it is the amount of money that matters, not of mind. Someone dreaded ten million sesterces, and what others seek by prayer he fled by poison. But for a man of so warped a mind that last draught was the most wholesome of all: he was eating and drinking poisons even then, when he not only took delight in his boundless banquets but gloried in them, when he paraded his vices, when he turned the city toward his own luxury, when he egged on the young to imitate him — young men teachable enough on their own, even without bad examples. 11. These things happen to men who refer their riches not to reason, whose limits are fixed, but to a vicious habit, whose will is boundless and beyond grasp. To greed nothing is enough; to nature even a little is enough. Therefore the exile’s poverty holds no discomfort; for no place of exile is so destitute that it is not abundantly fertile for the feeding of a man.

"But the exile will long for clothing and a house." These too he will long for only for use: neither roof nor covering will be lacking to him; for the body is clothed as cheaply as it is fed; nothing that nature made necessary for man did she make laborious. 2. But he longs for purple steeped in much shellfish-dye, woven through with gold and picked out with various colors and craftsmanship: that man is poor not by Fortune’s fault but by his own. Even if you restore to him whatever he has lost, you will achieve nothing; for the man restored will lack more of what he craves than the exile lacks of what he had. 3. But he longs for furnishings gleaming with golden vessels, and silver made famous by the ancient names of its craftsmen, bronze made precious by the madness of a few, and a throng of slaves to cramp a house however large, beasts’ bodies stuffed and forced to fatten, and the marbles of all nations: let these be heaped up — they will never fill an insatiable mind, no more than any quantity of water will suffice to satisfy a man whose craving rises not from want but from the fever of burning vitals; for that is no thirst but a disease. 4. Nor does this happen with money or food alone; the same nature belongs to every craving that is born not from want but from vice: whatever you heap upon it will be not the end of desire but a step in it. So the man who keeps himself within nature’s measure will not feel poverty; the man who exceeds nature’s measure, poverty will follow him even amid the highest riches. For necessities even places of exile suffice; for superfluities not even kingdoms. 5. It is the mind that makes men rich; it follows into exile, and in the harshest wildernesses, when it has found enough to sustain the body, it abounds in its own goods and enjoys them: money has nothing to do with the mind, no more than with the immortal gods. 6. All those things that untrained minds, too much enslaved to their own bodies, look up to — gems, gold, silver, and the great polished rounds of tables — are earthly weights, which a pure mind, mindful of its own nature, cannot love: itself light, unencumbered, and ready, whenever it is released, to dart up to the heights; meanwhile, so far as the hindrances of the limbs and this heavy burden poured around it allow, with swift and winged thought it ranges over things divine. 7. And therefore it can never go into exile, being free and kindred to the gods and equal to every world and every age; for its thought goes round the whole heaven, and is sent into all past and future time. This poor little body, the prison and chain of the mind, is tossed this way and that; upon it punishments, upon it robberies, upon it diseases are worked: but the mind itself is sacred and eternal, and one on which no hand can be laid.

Lest you think that, to make light of poverty’s discomforts — which no one feels heavy save him who thinks it so — I use only the precepts of the wise, look first at how much the greater part of men are poor, whom you will mark as no sadder and no more anxious than the rich: nay, I am not sure they are not the happier, in that their mind is pulled apart among fewer things. 2. Let us pass from the poor and come to the wealthy: how many are the times when they are like the poor! The baggage of travelers is cut back, and whenever the necessity of the road has demanded haste, the throng of attendants is dismissed. How small a part of their possessions do men on campaign have with them, when the discipline of the camp removes all the trappings! 3. Nor is it only the condition of the times or the scarcity of places that makes them the poor man’s equals: they take certain days, when a weariness of riches has come over them, on which to dine on the ground and, with gold and silver set aside, to use earthenware. Madmen! what they sometimes crave they always dread. Oh, what a darkness of mind, what ignorance of the truth harasses them — that poverty which they imitate for pleasure’s sake! 4. For my part, whenever I have looked back to the ancient examples, I am ashamed to use consolations for poverty, since the luxury of our times has slid so far that the travel-allowance of exiles is greater than once the patrimony of leading men was. It is well established that Homer had one slave, Plato three, Zeno — from whom the rigid and manly wisdom of the Stoics began — none: will anyone, then, say that they lived wretchedly, without himself seeming to everyone the most wretched of all for saying it? 5. Menenius Agrippa, who was the broker of public concord between the senators and the plebs, was buried by a collection taken up. Atilius Regulus, while he was routing the Carthaginians in Africa, wrote to the senate that his hired man had left and his farm had been deserted by him; whereupon the senate resolved that it be tended at public expense while Regulus was away: was it not worth being without a slave, to have the Roman people for one’s farmer? 6. Scipio’s daughters received their dowry from the treasury, because their father had left them nothing: it was fair, by Hercules, that the Roman people should pay tribute to Scipio once, since it was always exacting it from Carthage. O fortunate husbands of the girls, for whom the Roman people stood in a father-in-law’s place! Do you think those men happier whose pantomime-girls marry on a dowry of a million sesterces than Scipio, whose children received heavy bronze for a dowry from the senate, their guardian? 7. Does anyone disdain poverty, of which the likenesses are so illustrious? Does an exile resent that something is lacking to him, when a dowry was lacking to Scipio, a hired hand to Regulus, a funeral to Menenius — when to all of them what was lacking was supplied the more honorably precisely because it had been lacking? With these, then, as its advocates, poverty is not only safe but even held in favor.

It may be answered: "Why do you artfully pull apart things that singly can be borne, but together cannot? A change of place is tolerable, if you change only place; poverty is tolerable, if disgrace is absent — which even by itself is wont to crush men’s minds." 2. Against this man — whoever will frighten me with a throng of evils — these words must be used: "If against any one quarter of Fortune you have strength enough, the same will serve against all. When once virtue has hardened the mind, it makes it invulnerable on every side. If avarice has let you go — the most violent plague of the human race — ambition will give you no pause; if you look on your last day not as a punishment but as a law of nature, then once you have cast the fear of death out of your breast, the fear of nothing else will dare to enter it; 3. if you reflect that lust was given to man not for pleasure’s sake but for the propagation of the race, then whoever has not been violated by this hidden destruction fixed in his very vitals, every other craving will pass him by untouched. Reason lays low not vices one by one but all alike: the victory is won once, over the whole." 4. Do you think that any wise man can be moved by disgrace — one who has placed everything in himself, who has withdrawn from the opinions of the crowd? More even than disgrace is a disgraceful death: yet Socrates, with that same face with which he had once, alone, brought the Thirty Tyrants to order, entered the prison, to strip the disgrace from the place itself; for it could not seem a prison in which Socrates was. 5. Who is so blinded to the seeing of the truth as to think it a disgrace that Marcus Cato suffered a double rejection in his candidacy for the praetorship and the consulship? That disgrace belonged to the praetorship and the consulship, which were to draw their honor from Cato. 6. No one is despised by another unless he has first despised himself. A low and abject mind lies open to that insult; but the man who raises himself against the cruelest mischances and overturns the evils by which others are crushed holds his very miseries in the place of priestly fillets, since we are so constituted that nothing wins so great an admiration with us as a man bravely wretched. 7. At Athens Aristides was being led to execution, and whoever met him cast down his eyes and groaned, as though the sentence were being carried out not upon a just man but upon Justice herself; yet one was found to spit in his face. He might have taken this hard, for he knew that no man of clean mouth would dare it; but he wiped his face and, smiling, said to the magistrate escorting him: "Warn that fellow not to open his mouth so foully hereafter." This was to do insult to insult itself. 8. I know that some say nothing is heavier than contempt, that death seems to them preferable. To these I will answer that exile too is often free of all contempt: if a great man has fallen, he has lain great, and he is no more despised than the ruins of sacred buildings are trodden underfoot — ruins the devout adore as much as when they stood.

Since on my account, dearest mother, you have nothing to drive you to endless tears, it follows that your own causes goad you. And there are two; for either this moves you, that you seem to have lost some protection, or this, that you cannot bear the longing itself for its own sake. 2. The first part I must touch on lightly; for I know your mind, which loves nothing in its own people except themselves. Let those mothers look to it who wield their children’s power with a woman’s lack of self-control — who, because women are not allowed to hold offices, are ambitious through their sons, who both drain and angle for their sons’ estates, who wear out their sons’ eloquence by lending it to others: 3. you rejoiced most in your children’s goods, and used them least; you always set a limit on our generosity, while setting none on your own; you, a daughter still under your father’s roof, gave of your own accord to your wealthy sons; you managed our estates so as to toil over them as though they were your own, and to keep your hands off them as though they were another’s; you spared our influence as though you were using another’s property, and from our honors nothing came to you but pleasure and expense. Never did your indulgence have an eye to advantage; so you cannot, in a son snatched away, long for things that, while he was safe, you never considered to belong to you.

My whole consolation must be turned toward that point from which the true force of a mother’s grief arises: "So I am deprived of my dearest son’s embrace; I can enjoy neither the sight of him nor his conversation. Where is he at whose sight I relaxed my sad face, in whom I laid down all my anxieties? Where are the talks of which I was never sated? Where the studies in which I took part more gladly than a woman, more intimately than a mother? Where that running to meet me? Where the boyish joy always at the sight of his mother?" 2. To these you add the very places of our rejoicings and our gatherings, and — as must be — the marks of our recent companionship, most powerful to torment the mind. For this too Fortune contrived cruelly against you, that she willed you to depart only three days before I was struck down, untroubled and fearing nothing of the kind. 3. It was well that the distance of places had divided us, well that an absence of some years had prepared you for this evil: you returned, not to take pleasure in your son, but to lose the habit of longing. Had you been away long before, you would have borne it more bravely, the interval itself softening the longing; had you not gone away, you would at least have had the last fruit of seeing your son two days longer: as it is, a cruel fate has so arranged things that you were neither present at my misfortune nor accustomed to my absence. 4. But the harder these things are, the greater the virtue you must call up, and you must close more fiercely, as with an enemy known and already often beaten. This blood did not flow from an untouched body of yours: you have been struck through your very scars.

There is no reason for you to use the excuse of being a woman, to which an almost immoderate right to tears has been granted — yet not a boundless one; and so our forefathers gave women a span of ten months for mourning husbands, that by a public ordinance they might come to terms with the stubbornness of a woman’s grief. They did not forbid mourning but set it a limit; for to be afflicted with endless grief, when you have lost one of your dearest, is foolish self-indulgence, and with none is inhuman hardness: the best tempering between devotion and reason is both to feel the longing and to master it. 2. There is no reason to look to certain women whose sadness, once taken up, only death has ended (you know some who, having lost their sons, never put off the mourning they had put on): a life braver from the start demands more of you; the excuse of womanhood cannot fall to her from whom all the vices of women have been absent. 3. The greatest evil of the age, unchastity, did not bring you into the number of the many; no gems, no pearls bent you; riches did not blaze before you as though the greatest good of the human race; the imitation of worse people, dangerous even to the upright, did not twist you aside — you who were well brought up in an old-fashioned and strict household; never were you ashamed of your fruitfulness, as though it reproached you with your age; never, in the manner of other women, who seek all their commendation from their looks, did you hide your swelling womb as an unseemly burden, nor did you crush the hopes of children conceived within your vitals; 4. you did not defile your face with paints and allurements; never did a dress please you that would bare nothing more when it was laid aside: your one adornment, the fairest beauty and subject to no age, the greatest glory — such, in your eyes, was chastity. 5. And so you cannot, to keep up your grief, hold out the name of woman, from which your virtues have set you apart; you ought to be as far from women’s tears as from their vices. Not even women will let you waste away over your wound, but will bid you rise up, the necessary mourning quickly discharged, if only you will look upon those women whom conspicuous virtue has set among great men. 6. Fortune had reduced Cornelia from twelve children to two: if you would count Cornelia’s funerals, she had lost ten; if you would weigh them, she had lost the Gracchi. Yet to those weeping around her and cursing her fate she forbade that they accuse Fortune, who had given her the Gracchi for sons. From this woman ought to have been born the one who said in the assembly, "Would you speak ill of my mother, who bore me?" Much more spirited, it seems to me, is the mother’s word: the son set a high value on the Gracchi’s birth, the mother on their funerals too. 7. Rutilia followed her son Cotta into exile and was so bound by love that she preferred to suffer exile rather than longing, and did not return to her country until she returned with her son. The same son, now brought home and flourishing in public life, she lost as bravely as she had followed him, and no one marked her tears after her son was carried out for burial. In his banishment she showed courage, in his loss prudence; for nothing deterred her from devotion, and nothing held her fast in superfluous and foolish grief. With these women I want you numbered; whose life you have always imitated, their example you will best follow in checking and pressing down your sickness of soul.

I know the matter is not in our power, and that no passion is a slave to us — least of all the one born from grief; for it is fierce and stubborn against every remedy. Sometimes we wish to bury it and swallow down our groans; yet through the very face we have composed and feigned the tears pour out. Sometimes we occupy the mind with games or gladiators; but amid the very shows by which it is drawn off, some slight reminder of our longing undermines it. 2. And so it is better to conquer grief than to cheat it; for grief that has been tricked and drawn off by pleasures or occupations rises again, and from its very rest gathers force to rage: but whatever has yielded to reason is settled for good. So I will not point you to those things which I know many have used — to hold yourself by long travel or delight yourself with pleasant places, to spend much time on the careful keeping of accounts and the managing of an estate, to entangle yourself always in some new piece of business: all those things profit for a tiny moment, and are not remedies of grief but hindrances of it; but I would rather grief ended than be deceived. 3. And so I lead you to that to which all who flee Fortune must take refuge — to liberal studies: they will heal your wound, they will pluck out all your sadness. Even if you had never been accustomed to them, you would have to use them now; but so far as my father’s old-fashioned strictness allowed you, you did not indeed master all the good arts, but you touched them. 4. Would indeed that the best of men, my father, less given over to the custom of our forefathers, had been willing for you to be taught the precepts of wisdom rather than merely steeped in them! Now you would not have to prepare your defense against Fortune, but to bring it forth. Because of those women who use letters not for wisdom but are equipped by them for luxury, he allowed you to give yourself to study less than you might. Yet thanks to your grasping talent you drank in more than the time allowed; the foundations of all the disciplines are laid: now return to them; they will keep you safe. 5. They will console, they will delight; once they have entered your mind in good faith, never again will grief enter, never anxiety, never the superfluous vexation of vain torment. To none of these will your breast lie open; for to the other vices it has long been shut. These, indeed, are the surest defenses, and the only ones that can snatch you from Fortune.

But because, while you are reaching that harbor which study promises you, you have need of props to lean on, I want meanwhile to show you your own consolations. 2. Look to my brothers, while whom are safe it is not right for you to accuse Fortune. In each you have something to delight you by a different virtue: the one has won honors by industry, the other has wisely scorned them. Rest in the rank of the one son, in the repose of the other, in the devotion of both. I know my brothers’ inmost feelings: the one cultivates his rank for this, that he may be an ornament to you; the other has withdrawn into a tranquil and quiet life for this, that he may have time for you. 3. Well has Fortune arranged your children both for your help and for your delight: you can be defended by the rank of the one, and enjoy the leisure of the other. They will vie in their offices toward you, and the longing for one will be filled by the devotion of two. Boldly I can promise: nothing will be lacking to you but the number. 4. From these look also to your grandchildren: Marcus, the most winning of boys, at the sight of whom no sadness can last; nothing so great, nothing so fresh rages in anyone’s breast that he, flinging himself about you, does not soothe it away. 5. Whose tears would his merriment not check? Whose mind, drawn tight with anxiety, would his quick wit not loosen? Whom will that playfulness not call out into jokes? Whom will that chatter, which will sate no one, not turn toward itself and draw off, however fixed in his thoughts? I pray the gods: may it be ours to have him outlive us! 6. On me let all the cruelty of the fates come to rest, worn out; whatever a mother had to grieve, let it have passed into me; whatever a grandmother, into me. Let the rest of the throng flourish in its own estate: I will complain of nothing concerning my childlessness, nothing concerning my lot, if only I have been the expiatory offering of a household that will grieve no more. 7. Hold in your lap Novatilla, who will soon give you great-grandchildren — whom I had so transferred to myself, so claimed as my own, that, now she has lost me, she may seem an orphan, although her father is alive; love her on my behalf as well. Fortune lately took her mother from her: your devotion can bring it about that she only grieves to have lost a mother, and does not also feel it. 8. Now order her character, now shape it: precepts sink in deeper that are pressed upon tender years. Let her grow used to your conversation, let her be molded to your judgment: you will give her much, even if you give her nothing but your example. This solemn duty will serve you for a remedy; for nothing can turn a dutifully grieving mind from its anxiety except either reason or honorable occupation. 9. I would number your father too among your great consolations, were he not away. As it is, from your own feeling consider what his is toward you: you will understand how much more just it is that you be kept for him than spent on me. Whenever an immoderate force of grief invades you and bids you follow it, think of your father. To him, by giving so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, you have indeed brought it about that you are not his only one; yet the crowning of a life happily lived turns on you. While he lives, it is impious for you to complain that you have lived.

Your greatest consolation I had so far kept silent — your sister, that breast most faithful to you, into which all your cares are transferred as into a shared possession, that spirit which is a mother to us all. With her you have mingled your tears, on her bosom first you drew breath again. 2. She, indeed, always follows your feelings; yet in my case she grieves not only for your sake. In her arms I was carried to the city; by her devoted, motherly nursing I recovered through a long sickness; she extended her influence on behalf of my quaestorship, and she who could not bring herself even to the boldness of conversation or of an open greeting, for my sake let love conquer her modesty. Neither her secluded manner of life, nor her modesty — countrified amid such forwardness of women — nor her quiet, nor her retiring habits laid up for leisure, stood in her way to keep her from becoming, even, ambitious for my sake. 3. This, dearest mother, is the consolation by which you may be restored: join yourself to her as much as you can, bind yourself in her closest embraces. Mourners are wont to flee the things they most love and to seek freedom for their grief: but you, whatever you have resolved, betake yourself to her; whether you wish to keep this state of mind or lay it aside, with her you will find either the end of your grief or a companion in it. 4. But if I know the prudence of that most perfect of women, she will not suffer you to be consumed by a grief that will profit nothing, and she will tell you her own example, of which I too was a witness. She had lost a most beloved husband, our uncle, whom she had married as a maiden, and lost him in the very midst of a voyage; yet she bore at the same time both grief and fear, and, shipwrecked, having overcome the storms, she carried his body out. 5. Oh, how the excellent deeds of how many women lie in obscurity! Had that plain antiquity, with its wonders of virtue, fallen to her lot, with what a contest of talents would she be celebrated — a wife who, forgetful of her weakness, forgetful of the sea that even the hardiest must fear, exposed her own head to perils for the sake of a burial, and, while she thought of her husband’s funeral, feared nothing for her own! She is ennobled in everyone’s songs who gave herself as a substitute for her husband: this is something greater — to seek, at the hazard of one’s life, a tomb for one’s husband; greater is the love that at equal peril redeems less. 6. After this let no one wonder that, through the sixteen years in which her husband governed Egypt, she was never seen in public, admitted no provincial into her house, asked nothing of her husband, and suffered nothing to be asked of herself. And so that province — talkative and ingenious at insulting its prefects, in which even those who avoided the fault did not escape the infamy — looked up to her as a singular pattern of integrity, and, what is most difficult for a people that delights even in dangerous witticisms, it restrained all license of speech, and to this day always longs for one like her, though it never hopes for it. It would have been much, had the province approved her for sixteen years: it is more that it never knew her. 7. These things I relate not in order to recount her praises in full — to run over them so sparingly is to cut them short — but that you may understand that she is a woman of great spirit, whom neither ambition nor avarice, the companions and plagues of all power, conquered; whom the fear of death did not deter, as she watched her own shipwreck from a ship already stripped of its gear, from clinging to her lifeless husband and asking not how she might get out of there, but how she might carry him out. You ought to show a virtue equal to hers, and recall your mind from mourning, and act so that no one may think you repent of your childbearing.

But since it must be that, when you have done everything, your thoughts will still run back to me again and again, and that none of your children now comes more often before you — not because they are less dear, but because it is natural to bring the hand more often back to what hurts — hear how you should think of me: glad and brisk, as though all were at its best. And at its best it is, since the mind, free of all occupation, has time for its own works, and now delights itself with lighter studies, now, greedy for the truth, rises up to contemplate its own nature and the nature of the universe. 2. It inquires first into the lands and their position, then into the condition of the encircling sea and its alternate flows and ebbs; then it examines whatever full of dread lies between heaven and the lands — this space made tumultuous by thunders, lightnings, the blasts of winds, and the hurling-down of rainstorms, snow, and hail; then, the lower regions traversed, it breaks through to the heights and enjoys the most beautiful spectacle of things divine, and, mindful of its own eternity, it ranges over all that has been and will be, through every age.