Were I not aware, Marcia, that you stand as far from the weakness of a woman’s spirit as from the other vices, and that your character is looked upon as a kind of ancient model, I would not dare to come against your grief — the grief that even men cling to and brood upon willingly — nor would I have conceived the hope that, at so unfavorable a time, before so hostile a judge, on so invidious a charge, I might bring you to acquit Fortune. What gave me confidence was the strength of mind already put to the proof, and your virtue, approved by a great trial. It is no secret how you bore yourself in the matter of your father, whom you loved no less than your children, save that you did not wish him to outlive you. And I am not sure you did not wish even that; for great devotion permits itself certain things against good custom. The death of your father, Aulus Cremutius Cordus, you held back so far as you could; after it became clear to you that, among Sejanus’s creatures, that one road of escape from servitude lay open, you did not favor his resolve, but you gave up the struggle, beaten; you shed your tears in the open and swallowed your groans — yet you did not hide them behind a cheerful face — and this in an age when merely to do nothing impious was great devotion. 3. But when a change of times gave you some opening, you restored to the use of men your father’s genius, for which the penalty had been exacted, you reclaimed him from the death that is true death, and you set back among the public records the books which that bravest of men had written with his own blood. You deserved the best of Roman letters: a great part of them had burned; the best of posterity, to whom the incorrupt record of events will come, charged to its author at a high price; the best of the man himself, whose memory lives and will live as long as it is worth anything to know the story of Rome — as long as there is anyone who wishes to return to the deeds of our forebears, as long as there is anyone who wishes to know what a Roman man is, what one man stayed unconquered when the necks of all were already broken and driven under the Sejanian yoke, what it is to be a man free in genius, in spirit, in hand. 4. A great loss, by Hercules, the commonwealth would have taken, had you not dug him out — cast as he was into oblivion for the two fairest of things, his eloquence and his liberty. He is read, he flourishes; received into the hands of men, into their hearts, he fears no old age; but of those butchers even the crimes — the one thing by which they earned remembrance — will soon fall silent too. This greatness of your spirit forbade me to regard your sex, forbade me to regard your face, which a grief unbroken for so many years holds fixed, just as it once drew over it. And see how I do not steal upon you, nor scheme to commit a theft upon your feelings: I have called old sorrows back to memory, and — that you might know this wound too must be healed — I have shown you the scar of a wound just as great. Let others, then, deal softly and coax; I have resolved to do battle with your sorrow, and your eyes, worn out and drained — flowing now, if you would have the truth, more from habit than from longing — I will hold in check, if it can be done, with your favor toward your own cure; if not, even against your will, though you cling to your grief and embrace it, the grief you have kept alive in your son’s place. 6. For what end will there be? Everything has been tried in vain: the exhortations of friends are spent, the weight of great men and your kinsmen; learning, that inherited and paternal good, passes by deaf ears, giving you scarcely a brief distraction for solace; even that natural remedy of time, which settles the greatest troubles, in your case alone has lost its power. The third year now is passing, and meanwhile nothing has fallen away from that first onset: your mourning renews and braces itself daily, and by now it has made for itself a right out of delay, and has come to think it shameful to stop. As all vices sink in deep unless they are crushed while they rise, so these sorrowing, wretched feelings, savage against themselves, feed at last on their very bitterness, and grief becomes the perverse pleasure of an unhappy mind. 8. I could have wished, then, to come to this cure in its first days; a gentler medicine might have checked the force while it was still rising: against ills grown inveterate the fight is fiercer. For the healing of wounds, too, is easy while they are fresh with blood: then they are cauterized, drawn back to the depths, and admit the searching fingers — but once they have festered into a malignant ulcer. I cannot now approach so hard a grief by indulgence or softly: it must be broken.

I know that all who wish to admonish someone begin with precepts and end with examples. It is worth varying this practice now and then; for one must deal differently with different people: some are led by reason, to others famous names must be set up against them, and an authority that leaves the mind no freedom while it stands dazzled by what is splendid. 2. I will set before your eyes two examples, the greatest of your sex and your age: one a woman who surrendered herself to be carried off by grief, the other who, struck by a like misfortune and a greater loss, yet did not grant her ills a long dominion over her, but quickly put her mind back in its own place. 3. Octavia and Livia, the one Augustus’s sister, the other his wife, lost their sons in youth, each with the sure hope of a future princeps: Octavia lost Marcellus, on whom both his uncle and his father-in-law had begun to lean, on whom to rest the burden of empire — a young man keen in spirit, powerful in genius, yet of a frugality and self-command remarkable beyond his years or his wealth, enduring of toil, a stranger to pleasures, ready to bear whatever his uncle might wish to lay upon him or, so to speak, to build upon him; well had Augustus chosen foundations that would yield to no weight. 4. She set no end, through her whole life’s span, to weeping and groaning, nor admitted any voices that brought something healing; she would not even allow herself to be drawn away. Intent upon the one thing and fixed there with her whole soul, she was through all her life such as she was at the funeral — I do not say not daring to rise, but refusing to be lifted, counting it a second bereavement to let her tears go. 5. She would have no likeness of her dearest son, would have no mention made to her of him. She hated all mothers, and raged most against Livia, because the happiness once promised to herself seemed to have passed over to that woman’s son. Most at home in darkness and solitude, not so much as glancing toward her brother, she rejected the poems composed to celebrate Marcellus’s memory and the other honors of letters, and shut her ears against all comfort. Withdrawn from the solemn observances, hating the very fortune that shone too brightly around her brother’s greatness, she buried and hid herself away. With her children and grandchildren sitting by, she would not lay aside her mourning dress — not without affront to all her own people, in whose safety she still counted herself bereft.

Livia had lost her son Drusus, a great princeps to be, already a great commander; he had pressed deep into Germany and had planted the Roman standards where it was scarcely known that any Romans existed. On campaign he had died, the enemy themselves attending him in his sickness with reverence and a mutual peace, not daring to wish for what was to their advantage. To this death, which he had met for the commonwealth, was added the immense longing of citizens and provinces and all Italy, through which, as the towns and colonies poured out to the mournful office, the funeral was led all the way to the city, most like a triumph. 2. The mother had not been permitted to drink in her son’s last kisses and the welcome words of his dying lips; following over the long road the remains of her Drusus, fretted by so many pyres ablaze through all Italy — as though she lost him as often as that — yet the moment she laid him in the tomb, she laid down at once both him and her grief, and grieved no more than was honorable with Caesar living or fair with Tiberius safe. She did not cease, in the end, to celebrate the name of her Drusus, to set him before herself everywhere, privately and publicly, to speak of him most gladly and to hear of him: she lived with his memory — which no one can keep and frequent who has made it grief to himself. Choose, then, which example you think the more worthy. If you wish to follow the former, you take yourself out of the number of the living: you will turn away from others’ children and from your own and from the very one you long for; you will meet mothers as a grim omen; honorable pleasures, permitted ones, you will cast off as too unbecoming to your lot; you will cling, hateful, to the daylight, and to your own age — because it does not hurl you down as soon as may be and finish you — you will be most hostile; and what is most base and most foreign to a mind, like yours, turned toward the better part, you will show that you do not wish to live and cannot die. 4. But if you apply yourself to the example of this greatest of women, more moderate, milder, you will not be among torments nor wear yourself out upon your own rack: for what madness is it — curse it — to exact from oneself the penalty of misfortune and to swell one’s own ills! The uprightness and modesty of character you have kept in all your life, you will display in this matter too; for there is a certain restraint even in grieving. That young man himself, most worthy that he should make you glad whenever he is named and thought of, you will set in a better place, if he comes to meet his mother — cheerful and with joy, as in life he used to come.

Nor will I lead you to harsher precepts, bidding you bear human things in an inhuman fashion, drying a mother’s eyes on the very day of the funeral. I will come with you to arbitration: this is the question between us, whether grief ought to be great or unending. 2. I do not doubt that the example of Julia Augusta, whom you cultivated as an intimate, pleases you more: she calls you to her own counsel. In the first heat, when miseries are most impatient and fierce, she offered herself to be consoled by Areus, her husband’s philosopher, and confessed that this had profited her much — more than the Roman people, whom she did not wish to make sad by her own sadness; more than Augustus, who, with one of his supports knocked away, was tottering and ought not to be bowed down by the mourning of his own; more than her son Tiberius, whose devotion brought it about that, at that funeral so bitter and wept by the nations, she felt nothing lacking to her but the number. 3. This, I think, was his approach, this his opening with a woman so careful a guardian of her own repute: "Until this day, Julia — so far at least as I know, the constant companion of your husband, to whom not only what is sent out into public is known, but all the more secret motions of your hearts — you have taken pains that there be nothing for anyone to reprove in you; and not only in the greater matters have you watched this, but in the least, doing nothing for which you would wish to ask pardon of report, the freest judge of princes. 4. And I think nothing fairer than that those placed on the highest summit should grant pardon for many things, ask it for none; so in this matter too your own custom must be kept, that you commit nothing you would wish done less, or otherwise."

Next I beg and beseech you not to show yourself difficult to your friends and hard to handle. For you cannot fail to know that all these people do not know how to bear themselves — whether to say something about Drusus in your presence or nothing — lest either forgetfulness of so illustrious a young man wrong him, or the mention of him wrong you. 2. When we have withdrawn and gathered by ourselves, we celebrate his deeds and words with all the regard they earned; before you there is deep silence about him. You go without, then, the greatest pleasure, the praises of your son, which I do not doubt you would, if the power were given, prolong into all ages even at the cost of your life. 3. Therefore allow — nay, invite — the talk in which he is recounted, and lend open ears to your son’s name and memory; and do not hold this heavy in the manner of the rest, who in a case of this kind think it part of the evil to hear consolations. 4. As it is, you have leaned wholly to the other side, and forgetting the better things, you regard your fortune at its worst. You do not turn to the company of your son and the joy of meeting him, not to his boyish, sweet endearments, not to the growth of his studies: you press upon that last face of things; upon it — as though it were not horrid enough of itself — you heap whatever you can. Do not, I beseech you, lust after the most perverse of glories, to seem the unhappiest of women. 5. Consider too that there is nothing great in playing the brave in prosperity, when life proceeds on a favorable course: a calm sea and an obliging wind do not display the helmsman’s art either; some adversity must come on to prove the spirit. 6. So do not bow down; on the contrary, plant your step firm and bear up whatever burden has fallen from above, frightened only at the first crash. Nothing makes Fortune more an object of resentment than an even mind. After this he showed her her son safe and sound, showed her grandsons from the one she had lost.

Your business was being transacted there, Marcia; for you Areus sat down; change the part — it was you he consoled. But suppose, Marcia, that more was snatched from you than any mother ever lost — I do not soothe you or make light of your calamity: if fates are conquered by weeping, let us weep together; 2. let every day pass amid mourning, let sorrow consume the sleepless night; let hands be driven against a torn breast, let the assault fall upon the very face, and let grief, ready to profit by it, exercise itself in every kind of savagery. But if no beating of the breast calls back the dead, if a lot unmoved and fixed for eternity is changed by no misery, and death holds fast whatever it has carried off, then let the grief cease that is wasted. 3. So let us be steered, and let this force not carry us off our course. Shameful is the master of a ship from whom the wave has wrenched the rudder, who has deserted the floundering sails and given the vessel up to the storm; but praiseworthy, even in shipwreck, the man whom the sea overwhelms still gripping the tiller and braced against it.

"But longing for one’s own is natural." Who denies it, so long as it is moderate? For at the parting — not only the loss — of those dearest to us, even the strongest minds must feel the necessary pang and contraction. But there is more in what opinion adds than in what nature has commanded. 2. Look how violent the longings of dumb animals are, and yet how brief: the lowing of cows is heard for a day or two, and no longer is the wandering, witless galloping of mares; wild beasts, after they have tracked the trail of their cubs and ranged the woods, after they have often returned to their plundered dens, quench their rage within a short time; birds, after they have shrieked loudly about their empty nests, within a moment settle and resume their flights; and no animal has a long longing for its offspring except man, who attends his own grief and is afflicted not so much as he feels but so much as he has resolved. 3. And that you may know this — to be broken by mourning — is not natural: the same bereavement wounds women more than men, barbarians more than the men of a peaceable and cultivated people, the unlearned more than the learned. Yet things that take their force from nature keep that same force in all: it is plain that what varies is not natural. 4. Fire will burn men of every age and the citizens of every city, women as much as men; iron will show its power of cutting on every body. Why? Because their strength was given them by nature, which decrees nothing for the person. Poverty, mourning, ambition — one feels them this way, another that, according as habit has steeped him; and a presumed belief about things not to be feared makes a man weak and unable to endure what is terrible.

Next, what is natural does not lessen with delay: a long day consumes grief. Be it never so stubborn, rising daily and boiling up against remedies, still that most effective tamer of its fierceness, time, drains it. 2. There remains to you indeed, Marcia, even now an immense sadness, and it already seems to have grown a callus — not the frantic sort it was at the start, but persistent and obstinate; yet this too your years will little by little take from you: whenever you busy yourself with something else, your mind will be relaxed. 3. As it is, you keep guard over yourself; but it makes a great difference whether you allow yourself to mourn or command it. How much more befitting the elegance of your character, to make an end of mourning rather than to wait for it, and not to look for the day on which, against your will, grief shall cease! Renounce it yourself.

"Whence, then, comes such stubbornness in us in bewailing our own, if it is not done by nature’s bidding?" Because we set before ourselves no evil before it befalls; as though immune ourselves, and having entered the road more peaceably than others, we are not warned by the misfortunes of others that they are common to all. 2. So many funerals pass our house: we do not think of death; so many untimely deaths: we busy our minds with the toga of our infants, with their military service and their succession to a father’s inheritance; so many of the rich fall into sudden poverty before our eyes: and it never comes into our mind that our own wealth too is set on just as slippery a footing. We must needs fall the harder, then: we are struck as if out of the blue; what has been foreseen long before comes on more feebly. 3. Would you know that you stand exposed to all blows, and that the weapons which fixed others have whizzed about you? Then — as though you approached half-armed some wall, or some place besieged by a great host and steep to climb — expect a wound, and think those stones flying overhead with the arrows and javelins are aimed at your body. Whenever someone falls at your side or behind your back, cry out: "You will not deceive me, Fortune, nor crush me off guard or careless. I know what you are preparing: someone else, indeed, you struck, but it was me you were after. 4. Who ever looked upon his affairs as one about to perish? Which of you ever dared to think of exile, of want, of mourning? Who, if he were warned to think of it, would not reject it as a dire omen and bid those things go upon the heads of his enemies, or of the ill-timed warner himself? "I did not think it would happen." 5. Do you think anything will not happen, which you know can happen, which you see has happened to many? A fine verse, and worthy not to have come from the stage: What can befall anyone can befall everyone. That man lost his children: you too can lose yours; that man was condemned: your innocence too is under the blow. Error deceives us here, unmans us, while we suffer what we never foresaw we could suffer. He robs present ills of their force who has looked ahead to those to come.

Whatever this is, Marcia, that shines about us from outside — children, honors, riches, spacious halls and vestibules crammed with a throng of clients shut out, a famous name, a noble or beautiful wife, and the rest that hangs on an uncertain and shifting lot — these are another’s trappings, on loan; none of them is given as a gift. The stage is decked with properties borrowed and bound to return to their owners; some of them will go back on the first day, some on the second, few will hold out to the end. 2. So there is no reason for us to admire ourselves as though set among our own: we have received them on loan. The use and enjoyment are ours, whose term that arbiter of his own gift fixes; we ought to keep ready what was given for an uncertain day, and when called upon to restore it without complaint: it is the worst sort of debtor who rails at his creditor. 3. All our own, then — both those we hope, by the law of birth, will outlive us, and those whose own most just prayer it is to go before us — we ought so to love as though nothing were promised us of their perpetuity, nay, nothing of their duration. Often must the mind be admonished: let it love things as bound to depart, nay, as departing already; whatever has been given by Fortune, possess it as though its author were removed. 4. Snatch your pleasures from your children, give yourselves in turn to your children to be enjoyed, and drain every joy without delay: nothing is promised for tonight — I have granted too long a reprieve — nothing for this hour. We must hasten, we are pressed from behind: presently this company will be scattered, presently these comradeships will be broken up with a cry raised. Everything is plunder: wretches, you do not know how to live in flight. 5. If you grieve that your son is dead, the charge belongs to the time when he was born; for death was pronounced upon him at his birth; into this law he was begotten, this fate attended him straight from the womb. 6. We have come into Fortune’s kingdom, and a harsh and unconquerable one, to suffer at her caprice the deserved and the undeserved. Our bodies she will abuse wantonly, insolently, cruelly: some she will scorch with fires, applied for punishment or for cure; some she will bind — now an enemy will be allowed this, now a fellow citizen; some she will toss naked through uncertain seas, and when they have wrestled with the waves she will not so much as cast them out on sand or shore, but will bury them in the belly of some immense beast; others, wasted by various kinds of disease, she will keep long suspended between life and death. Like a mistress changeable and willful, careless of her slaves, she will deal her punishments and her gifts at random.

What need to bewail the parts? The whole of life is to be wept over: new troubles will press before you have satisfied the old. So a measure must be set, by you above all, who bear things beyond measure, and the force of the human breast parceled out among its many griefs. And then, what is this forgetfulness of your own condition and the common one? You were born mortal, and mortals you bore: did you hope, out of so weak a stuff — a body putrid and running and assailed again and again by its causes — that you carried something solid and eternal? 2. Your son has died, that is, has run down to that end toward which the things you count happier than your offspring are hurrying. To this all that crowd which litigates in the forum, applauds in the theaters, prays in the temples, makes its way at an unequal pace: what you love and revere and what you despise, one ash will level. 3. This, clearly, is the meaning of that utterance ascribed to the Pythian oracle: know thyself. What is man? A vessel that any shaking will crack, any tossing break. No great storm is needed to scatter you: wherever you strike, you come apart. What is man? A weak and fragile body, naked, by its own nature unarmed, needing another’s help, flung out to all the insults of fortune; when it has trained its muscles well, the food of any wild beast, the victim of any; woven of weak and fluid stuff, sleek only in its outer lines; impatient of cold, of heat, of toil; bound for rot by very disuse and idleness; fearing its own nourishment, failing now for the lack of it, bursting now from the abundance; of an anxious and fretful keeping, of a precarious and ill-clinging breath, which a sudden fright or a noise heard unexpectedly and loud upon the ear shakes out; ever the nurse of its own disquiet, faulty and useless. 4. Do we wonder at death in this, which is the work of a single gasp? For is it a matter of great effort that it should fall? Smell and taste, weariness and wakefulness, drink and food and the things without which it cannot live are deadly to it; wherever it has moved, at once conscious of its own infirmity, not bearing every sky, sickening at strange waters and the breath of an unfamiliar air and at the slightest causes and offenses, rotten, sickly, having begun its life with weeping — and meanwhile what vast commotions this so contemptible animal stirs, into what thoughts it rises, forgetting its condition! 5. It turns over immortal and eternal things in its mind and makes provision for grandsons and great-grandsons, while meanwhile, as it strains at long designs, death overtakes it, and even what is called old age is the circuit of a very few years.

Your grief, Marcia — if only it has any reason in it — does it look to its own discomforts or to those of him who has died? Does it move you, in your lost son, that you took no pleasures from him, or that you might have taken greater, had he lived longer? 2. If you say you took none, you make your loss more bearable; for men long less for the things from which they took no joy or gladness. If you confess you took great pleasures, you ought not to complain of what was withdrawn, but to give thanks for what fell to you; for the fruits of your labors came out large enough in his very rearing — unless, indeed, those who rear puppies and birds and the trifling delights of the spirit take some pleasure from the sight and touch and coaxing flattery of dumb creatures, while for those who rear children the rearing itself is not the fruit of rearing. So though his industry brought you nothing, though his care guarded nothing, though his prudence advised nothing, the very fact that you had him, that you loved him, is the fruit. 3. "But it might have been longer, greater." Yet it has gone better with you than if it had never fallen to you at all, since, if the choice be set whether it is better to be happy not long or never, it is better that goods should come to us bound to depart than that none should come. Would you rather have had some degenerate, fit only to fill out the number and the name of a son, or one of such promise as yours was — a youth early prudent, early dutiful, early a husband, early a father, early attentive to every office, early a priest, in all things as one hastening? Scarce to anyone do great goods come, and lasting; no happiness endures and reaches the last but a slow one: the immortal gods, not meaning to give him to you long, gave him at once such as can scarcely be made over a long time. 4. You cannot even say you were chosen out by the gods as one not permitted to enjoy her son: cast your eyes over the whole press of those you know and do not know — everywhere you will meet those who have suffered greater things. Great generals have felt them, princes have felt them; not even the gods have the fables left untouched, in order, I suppose, that it might lighten our own funerals that even divine things fall. Look round, I say, at all: you will name no house so wretched that it does not find comfort in a more wretched one. 5. I do not, by Hercules, think so ill of your character as to suppose you could bear your lot more lightly if I produced for you an immense number of mourners: a malevolent kind of solace is a crowd of the wretched. Yet I will recall a few — not that you may know this is wont to happen to men (it is absurd to gather instances of mortality), but that you may know there have been many who softened hard things by bearing them calmly. 6. I will begin with the most fortunate. Lucius Sulla lost a son, and the thing neither blunted his malice and his keenest valor against enemies and citizens, nor made it seem he had taken falsely that surname which he assumed after losing his son, fearing neither the hatred of men — by whose harm those too-favorable fortunes of his stood — nor the envy of the gods, whose reproach it was that Sulla was so fortunate. But let it pass among things not yet judged, what manner of man Sulla was; even his enemies will grant he took up arms well and laid them down well: this much, which is the point, will stand fast — the greatest evil is not that which reaches even the most fortunate.

Lest Greece admire too much that father who, when his son’s death was announced in the very midst of the sacrifice, ordered only the flute-player to fall silent and drew the garland from his head, but performed the rest in due order — Pulvillus the pontifex matched him, to whom, as he held the doorpost and was dedicating the Capitol, his son’s death was announced. He pretended not to have heard it, and shaped the solemn words of the pontifical formula, no groan breaking off the prayer, and at his son’s name he made Jupiter propitious. 2. Do you think there ought to be any end to a grief whose first day and first onset did not draw a father from the public altars and the auspicious pronouncement? Worthy, by Hercules, of his memorable dedication, worthy of the most ample priesthood, who did not leave off worshiping the gods even when they were angry. Yet the same man, when he came home, both filled his eyes and let fall some tearful words; but when he had performed what custom required for the dead, he returned to that Capitoline countenance. 3. Paulus, about the days of that most glorious triumph in which he drove Perses in chains before his car, gave two of his sons in adoption and buried the two he had kept for himself. What sort do you think he kept, when Scipio was among those he gave away? Not without emotion did the Roman people behold Paulus’s empty car. Yet he addressed the assembly and gave the gods thanks that he had been made master of his prayer; for he had prayed that, if anything were owed to envy for so great a victory, it should be paid out of his own loss rather than the public’s. 4. You see with how great a spirit he bore it? He congratulated himself on his own bereavement. And whom could so great a reversal move more? He lost his comforts and his supports at one stroke. Yet it did not fall to Perses to see Paulus sad.

Why now should I lead you through countless examples of great men and seek out the wretched, as though it were not harder to find the happy? For how few houses have stood to the end with all their parts entire, with nothing in them thrown into disorder? Take any single year you like and call up its magistrates — Lucius Bibulus, if you will, and Gaius Caesar: you will see, between colleagues most hostile to each other, a concordant fortune. 2. Lucius Bibulus, a better than a braver man, had two sons killed at once, and made the sport of an Egyptian soldiery, so that no less than the bereavement itself the author of it was a thing worthy of tears. Yet Bibulus, who through the whole year of his office had lain hid at home for spite of his colleague, on the day after the twin funeral was reported went out to the wonted duties of his command. Who can give less than one day to two sons? So quickly did he end the mourning for his children, who had mourned the consulship a year. 3. Gaius Caesar, while he was traversing Britain and could not confine his good fortune within the ocean, heard that his daughter had died, drawing the public fates with her. Already before his eyes was Gnaeus Pompey, who would not bear with an even mind that any other be great in the commonwealth, and who would set a limit to increases that seemed heavy to him even when they grew for the common good. Yet within the third day he returned to his commander’s duties and conquered his grief as quickly as he was wont to conquer all things.

Why should I recount to you the funerals of the other Caesars? Whom Fortune seems to me at times to outrage for this very end, that so too they may profit the human race, showing that not even those who are said to be born of gods and to be about to beget gods hold their own fortune in their power as they hold another’s. 2. The deified Augustus, having lost children and grandchildren, the crowd of the Caesars exhausted, propped his deserted house by adoption: yet he bore it as bravely as one whose own case was now at stake, and whose chief concern it was that no one should complain of the gods. 3. Tiberius Caesar lost both the one he had begotten and the one he had adopted; yet he himself praised his son from the rostra and stood in sight of the corpse laid out, only a veil interposed to keep the pontifex’s eyes from the funeral, and while the Roman people wept he did not change his countenance: he gave Sejanus, standing at his side, proof of how patiently he could lose his own. Do you see what an abundance there is of the greatest men whom this calamity, that lays all low, did not exempt — men in whom so many goods of the spirit, so many ornaments, public and private, had been heaped? But this storm, you see, goes its round and lays all waste without choice and drives it as its own. Bid each man cast up his account: to no one has it fallen to be born unpunished.

I know what you will say: "You have forgotten that you are consoling a woman; you cite the examples of men." But who has said that nature has dealt grudgingly with the talents of women and drawn their virtues into a narrow compass? Equal vigor, believe me, is theirs, equal their capacity for honorable things, if only they please; pain and toil they endure as well, once they are used to them. 2. In what city, good gods, do we speak this? In the one where Lucretia and Brutus cast the king from the heads of the Romans: to Brutus we owe liberty, to Lucretia Brutus; in the one where Cloelia — for her signal daring, with enemy and river both despised — we have all but enrolled among the men: seated on her equestrian statue in the Sacred Way, that most thronged place, Cloelia reproaches our young men, as they mount their cushioned seats, that they should so enter the city in which we have granted even women a horse. 3. And if you wish examples cited to you of women who bravely bore the longing for their own, I will not go from door to door; out of one family I will give you two Cornelias: the first, Scipio’s daughter, the mother of the Gracchi. Twelve births she counted off by as many funerals; and of the rest it is easy, whom the state felt neither born nor lost: but Tiberius and Gaius, whom even one who denies they were good men will admit were great, she saw both slain and unburied. Yet to those who consoled her and called her wretched she said: "I will never call myself other than happy, who bore the Gracchi." 4. Cornelia, wife of Livius Drusus, had lost a most distinguished young man of illustrious gifts, treading in the Gracchi’s footsteps, slain within his own walls with so many of his bills unpassed, the author of the murder unknown. Yet she bore her son’s death, bitter and unavenged, with as great a spirit as he had carried his laws. 5. Now will you be reconciled with Fortune, Marcia, if the weapons she has driven into the Scipios and the Scipios’ mothers and daughters, with which she has aimed at the Caesars, she has not held back even from you? Life is full and beset with manifold misfortunes, from which there is for no one a long peace, scarcely a truce. Four children you had raised, Marcia. They say no weapon falls in vain that is sent into a packed column: is it a wonder that so great a throng could not be passed without envy or harm? 6. "But Fortune was the more unjust in this, that she not only snatched my sons but chose them." Yet you would never call it an injury to share on equal terms with one more powerful: she has left you two daughters, and grandchildren from them; and even the one you mourn most, forgetting the earlier, she has not wholly taken: you have from him two daughters — great burdens if you bear them ill, great comforts if well. Bring yourself to this, that when you see them you are reminded of your son, not of your grief. 7. The farmer, when his trees have been overthrown, torn up by the roots by the wind or snapped by a whirlwind twisting in sudden onset, cherishes the stock left of them and at once sets seeds and slips in place of the lost; and in a moment (for as time is swift to losses, so is it to increase) they grow up more luxuriant than the lost. 8. Substitute now these daughters of your Metilius in his stead, and fill the empty place, and lighten one grief with a doubled solace. Yet such is the nature of mortals that nothing pleases more than what is lost: we are too unjust toward what is left, out of longing for what is snatched away. But if you will reckon how greatly Fortune, even when she raged, spared you, you will know you have more than comforts: look at so many grandchildren, two daughters. Say this too, Marcia: "I would be moved, if each man’s fortune answered to his character and ills never followed the good: as it is, I see that, with the distinction removed, good and bad are tossed about in the same way."

"It is hard, though, to lose a young man you have raised, just when he was a guard and an ornament to mother and father alike." Who denies it is hard? But it is human. To this you were begotten: to lose, to perish, to hope, to fear, to disquiet others and yourself, both to fear death and to wish for it, and — worst of all — never to know what your condition was. 2. Suppose someone setting out for Syracuse were told: "Learn beforehand all the discomforts and all the pleasures of your coming journey, and then so sail. These are the things you may marvel at: you will see first the island itself cut off from Italy by a narrow strait, which it is agreed once clung to the mainland; the sea suddenly broke in there and cut the Hesperian side from the Sicilian. Then you will see (for it will be allowed you to skim that most greedy whirlpool of the sea) the fabled Charybdis spread out, calm as long as it is free of the south wind, but, if anything blows more violently from there, swallowing ships with a great and deep gulf. 3. You will see the spring Arethusa, most celebrated in song, of a pool most bright and clear to the bottom, pouring out its ice-cold waters — whether it found them there first springing, or gave back a river whole, slipped beneath the earth under so many seas and kept from mingling with the worse wave. 4. You will see the calmest harbor of all that nature has set for the keeping of fleets or man’s hand has helped, so safe that not even the fury of the greatest storms has room there. You will see where the power of Athens was broken, where that natural prison shut in so many thousands of captives within rocks cut to an infinite depth, the vast city itself and a territory more spacious than the bounds of many cities, the mildest winters and no day without the sun’s coming. 5. But when you have learned all this, a heavy and unwholesome summer will spoil the gifts of the winter sky. There will be Dionysius the tyrant there, the ruin of liberty, justice, and law, greedy for domination even after Plato, for life even after exile: some he will burn, some he will scourge, some for a slight offense he will order beheaded; he will summon to his lust males and females, and amid the foul herds of his royal incontinence it will be too little to couple two at a time. You have heard what may invite you, what deter you: so either sail or hold off." 6. After this warning, if anyone said he wished to enter Syracuse, could he have a complaint just against anyone but himself, who had not stumbled into those things but come knowing and aware? Nature says to all of us: "I deceive no one. If you raise sons, you may have them handsome, and you may have them deformed. Perhaps many will be born: one of them may be as much the savior of his country as its betrayer. 7. There is no cause to despair that they will be of such standing that no one will dare speak ill of you for their sake; yet consider too that they may come to such baseness as to be themselves curses upon you. Nothing forbids that they perform your last rites and that you be praised by your children, but so prepare yourself as one about to lay on the fire a boy, a youth, or an old man; for the years are nothing to the point, since no funeral is anything but bitter that a parent follows." After these laws set forth, if you raise children, you free the gods from all resentment, who promised you nothing certain.

To this image, come, refer the entrance into the whole of life. While you deliberated whether to visit Syracuse, I set out whatever could delight, whatever could offend; suppose I come to counsel you at your birth. 2. "You are about to enter a city shared by gods and men, embracing all things, bound by fixed and eternal laws, rolling round the unwearied offices of the heavenly bodies. You will see there countless stars glittering, you will see all things filled by one star, the sun marking with his daily course the spaces of day and night, with his yearly the summers and winters, dividing them out more evenly. You will see the nightly succession of the moon, borrowing from her brother’s meetings a soft and slackened light, now hidden, now hanging over the earth with her full face, changeable in her gains and losses, ever unlike her nearest self. You will see five stars driving diverse ways and straining against the headlong heaven: on their lightest motions hang the fortunes of peoples, and the greatest things and the least are shaped according as a favorable or unfavorable star has moved. You will wonder at the gathered clouds and the falling waters and the slanting lightnings and the crash of heaven. 4. When, sated with the spectacle of things above, you cast your eyes down to the earth, another form of things will receive you, marvelous in another way: on this side the spread plain of fields opening to infinity, on that the peaks of mountains rising sheer with great and snowy ridges; the falling of rivers, and streams diffused from a single source toward west and east, and groves nodding on the highest summits, and so much forest with its own animals and the discordant concert of birds; 5. the varied sites of cities and the nations sealed off by the difficulty of their ground, some withdrawing onto steep mountains, others crouching in fear along banks, lakes, valleys; the crop helped by tillage, and the thickets growing wild without a tiller; the gentle running of brooks among the meadows, and the lovely bays and the shores receding into a harbor; the islands scattered, so many through the waste, which by their interposition divide the seas. 6. What of the gleam of stones and gems, and the gold flowing among the sands of swift torrents, and amid the lands and amid the sea again the firebrands of flame, and the ocean, the binding of the lands, sundering the continuity of nations with its triple gulf and boiling up with vast lawlessness? 7. You will see here, swimming in restless waters that surge without a wind, creatures exceeding land animals in size, some heavy and moved by another’s guidance, some swift and fleeter than driven oars, some drawing in the waves and breathing them out to the great peril of those sailing past; you will see here ships seeking lands they do not know. You will see nothing left unattempted by human daring, and you will be both a spectator and yourself a great part of the venturers: you will learn and teach the arts, some that furnish life, some that adorn it, some that govern it. 8. But there will be there a thousand plagues of bodies and of minds, and wars and robberies and poisons and shipwrecks and the distempers of climate and of body, and the bitter longings for those dearest, and death — uncertain whether easy or through penalty and torture. Deliberate with yourself and weigh what you wish: to come to those things, you must go out through these." You will answer that you wish to live. Why not? Nay, I think, you will not approach that from which to have anything struck away grieves you! Live, then, as befits the terms. "No one," you say, "consulted us." Our parents were consulted about us, who, knowing the condition of life, raised us into it.

But to come to consolations, let us see first what is to be cured, then how. What moves the mourner is the longing for him she loved. That this is in itself bearable is plain; for the absent and those to be absent while they live we do not weep, although all use of them, with the sight, is snatched from us; it is opinion, then, that racks us, and each evil is worth just as much as we have priced it. We hold the remedy in our own power: let us judge them absent, and deceive ourselves; we have sent them off — nay, sent them ahead, about to follow. 2. This too moves the mourner: "There will be no one to defend me, to vindicate me from contempt." To use a solace not at all creditable but true: in our city bereavement confers more favor than it takes away, and loneliness, which used to undo old age, so leads to power that some feign hatred of their sons and disown their children, and make themselves childless by their own hand. 3. I know what you will say: "My own losses do not move me; for he is not worthy of consolation who takes a son’s death as hard as a slave’s, who has leisure to regard in his son anything beyond the son himself." What, then, moves you, Marcia? Is it that your son has died, or that he did not live long? If that he died, you ought always to have grieved; for you always knew he would die. 4. Consider that the dead are touched by no ills, that the things which make the underworld terrible to us are fables, that no darkness threatens the dead, no prison, no rivers blazing with fire, no river of Oblivion, no tribunals and defendants, and no tyrants again in that liberty so free: these things the poets have made their play, and harried us with empty terrors. 5. Death is the release from all pains, and the boundary beyond which our ills do not pass; it sets us back in that tranquillity in which we lay before we were born. If anyone pities the dead, let him pity the unborn too. Death is neither good nor evil; for that can be good or evil which is something; but what is itself nothing, and reduces all to nothing, hands us over to no fortune. For evils and goods turn about some matter: Fortune cannot hold what nature has let go, nor can he be wretched who is nothing. 6. Your son has passed the bounds within which there is slavery; a great and eternal peace has taken him: he is not pricked by fear of poverty, nor by care of riches, nor by the goads of lust that gnaw the soul through pleasure; he is not touched by envy of another’s happiness, nor pressed by his own; not even with reproaches are his modest ears beaten; no public disaster is foreseen, none private; he does not hang anxious for the future, depending always on an issue that pays out into deeper uncertainty. At last he has come to rest where nothing drives him out, where nothing terrifies him.

O ignorant of their own ills, who do not praise death as the best invention of nature and await it — whether it shuts in happiness, or beats off calamity, or ends the satiety and weariness of the old, or leads off the youthful age in its flower while better things are hoped, or recalls childhood before its harder steps: to all an end, to many a remedy, to some a thing prayed for, of none better deserving than of those to whom it comes before it is summoned. 2. This dismisses slavery against the master’s will; this lightens the captives’ chains; this leads out of prison those whom an unbridled power had forbidden to go out; this shows to exiles, ever straining mind and eyes toward their homeland, that it makes no difference beneath whom one lies; this, when Fortune has badly divided the common goods and given one man, born to equal right, to be another’s, makes all equal; this is the thing after which no one has done anything at another’s bidding; this is the thing in which no one has felt his own lowliness; this is the thing that lay open to all; this is the thing, Marcia, your father longed for; this, I say, is the thing that makes it no punishment to be born, that makes me not fall before the threats of chance, that lets me keep my soul whole and master of itself: I have something to appeal to. 3. I see there crosses, not of one kind but built differently by different men: some hang their victims head downward toward the ground, others drive a stake through their privates, others stretch out the arms on a gibbet; I see cords, I see scourges, and for each limb and joint a separate engine: but I see death too. There are there bloody enemies, proud fellow citizens: but I see death there too. It is no hardship to be a slave where, if you are sick of mastery, you may pass with a single step to liberty. I hold you dear, life, by the benefit of death. Consider how much good a timely death holds, how many it has harmed to have lived longer. If illness at Naples had carried off Gnaeus Pompey, that ornament and prop of the empire, he would have departed the undoubted chief of the Roman people: as it is, the addition of a little time threw him down from his summit. He saw his legions cut to pieces before his eyes, and from that battle in which the front rank was the Senate — how unhappy the remnants! — the commander himself surviving; he saw an Egyptian hangman, and gave to a henchman a body the victors had held inviolate, though, even had he stayed unharmed, he would have repented his rescue; for what was baser than that Pompey should live by a king’s bounty? 5. Marcus Cicero, if at the time when he escaped Catiline’s daggers — by which he was aimed at along with his country — he had fallen, the savior of the freed republic; if, last, he had followed his daughter’s funeral, even then he might have died happy. He would not have seen swords drawn against the heads of citizens, nor the goods of the slain divided among their killers, so that they perished even out of their own; nor the spear selling consular spoils, nor murders contracted at public charge, nor brigandage, wars, robberies, so many Catilines. 6. Marcus Cato, if the sea had swallowed him as he returned from Cyprus and the management of the royal inheritance, with that very money he was bringing as the pay of the civil war — would it not have gone well with him? This at least he would have carried off, that no one would dare to sin in Cato’s presence: as it is, the addition of a very few years forced a man born for liberty, not his own only but the public’s, to flee Caesar and follow Pompey. So untimely death brought him no evil; it remitted the endurance of all evils too.

"But too soon he perishes, and unripe." First, suppose he had survived — take in how far at most a man is permitted to go: how much is it? Brought forth for the briefest time, soon to yield our place to the comer, we look on this lodging as something thrust upon us. I speak of our spans of life, which roll round with incredible speed. Reckon the centuries of cities: you will see how short a time even those have stood that boast of their antiquity. All human things are brief and fleeting, and occupy no part of infinite time. 2. This earth, with its cities and peoples and rivers and the girdle of sea, we set as a point in comparison with the universe: our age holds a smaller portion than a point, if it be compared with all time, whose measure is greater than the world’s, since the world remeasures itself within that span so many times. What does it matter, then, to extend a thing whose increase, however great, will not be far from nothing? In one way only is what we live much: if it is enough. 3. You may name me long-lived men, and a senility handed down to memory, you may count up a hundred and ten years each: when you let your mind out to all time, there will be no difference between the shortest life and the longest, if, having looked at how long a span each has lived, you compare it with how long he has not lived. 4. Next, he died at his own ripeness; for he lived as long as he ought to live, nothing was left beyond for him. There is not one old age for men, as there is not even for animals: some are worn out within fourteen years, and this, their longest age, is for man his first; to each a different faculty of living is given. No one dies too soon, since he was not going to live longer than he lived. 5. A bound is fixed for each: it will stay always where it was set, and no diligence or favor will move it further. Hold it thus, that you lost him by design: he took his own, and reached the goal of the allotted span. There is no reason, then, to load yourself thus: "He might have lived longer." His life was not cut short, nor does chance ever break in among the years. What was promised each is paid; the fates go their way and neither add anything nor subtract once from the promise. In vain are prayers and pains: each will have just as much as the first day inscribed for him. From that on which he first saw the light he set out on the road of death and drew nearer to his fate, and those very years that were added to his youth were subtracted from his life. 7. In this error we all turn, that we think only the old and already declining incline toward death, when infancy and youth, every age, bears us thither. The fates do their work: they steal from us the sense of our own death, and, that it may creep up the more easily, death lurks under the very name of life: infancy turns into boyhood, boyhood into puberty, the old man carries off the youth. The increases themselves, if you reckon well, are losses.

Do you complain, Marcia, that your son did not live as long as he could have? For how do you know whether it would have profited him to live longer, whether he was provided for by this death? Can you find anyone today whose affairs are so well placed and founded that he has nothing to fear as time goes on? Human things slip and flow, nor is any part of our life so liable or so tender as the part that most pleases; therefore for the most fortunate death is to be prayed for, since in so great an inconstancy and turmoil of things nothing is certain but what is past. 2. Who guarantees you that that most beautiful body of your son, kept under the supreme guard of modesty amid the eyes of a luxurious city, could have escaped so many diseases as to carry the glory of its beauty unimpaired to old age? Think of the soul’s thousand stains; for even upright natures have not carried into old age the promise of themselves they made in youth, but have generally been turned aside: either a late and therefore fouler luxury has invaded and begun to dishonor splendid beginnings, or they have sunk wholly into the cookshop and the belly, and their chief care has been what to eat, what to drink. 3. Add fires, ruins, shipwrecks, and the manglings of physicians, picking the bones out of the living and plunging whole hands into the vitals and treating the privates with no simple pain; after these, exile (your son was no more innocent than Rutilius), prison (he was no wiser than Socrates), a breast pierced by a self-inflicted wound (he was no holier than Cato): when you have looked these things through, you will know it goes best with those whom nature, because this term of life awaited them, has quickly taken into safety. Nothing is so deceptive as human life, nothing so treacherous: no one, by Hercules, would have accepted it, were it not given to the ignorant. So if it is most fortunate not to be born, the next thing is, I think, that those who have finished a short span are quickly restored to wholeness. 4. Set before yourself that most bitter time, when Sejanus gave your father as a largess to his client Satrius Secundus. He was angry with him for one or another too-free word, because Cordus could not bear in silence that Sejanus was not merely being set on our necks but climbing onto them. A statue was being decreed for him, to be set up in Pompey’s theater, which Caesar was restoring after a fire: Cordus then cried out that the theater was truly perishing. 5. What then? Should he not burst, that Sejanus was being planted over the ashes of Gnaeus Pompey, and a faithless soldier consecrated among the monuments of the greatest commander? The endorsement is consecrated, and the fiercest hounds — which, that he might keep them tame to himself alone, savage to all, he fed on human blood — begin to bay around the man. 6. What was he to do? If he wished to live, Sejanus had to be entreated; if to die, his daughter; the one as inexorable as the other: he resolved to deceive his daughter. So, having used the bath that he might lay aside the more strength, he withdrew to his bedroom as if to take a bite, and, dismissing his slaves, threw some things out the window that he might seem to have eaten; then he abstained from dinner, as though he had eaten enough in his room. He did the same the second day and the third; the fourth made disclosure by the very weakness of his body. So embracing you he said: "Dearest daughter, and in this one thing concealed from you my whole life through, I have set out on the road of death, and now hold nearly its middle; you neither ought nor are able to call me back." And so he ordered all the light shut out and buried himself in darkness. 7. When his resolve was known, there was public joy, that the prey was being led out of the jaws of those most greedy wolves. His accusers, on Sejanus’s authority, approach the consuls’ tribunals, complain that Cordus is dying, to interrupt the very thing they had compelled: so far did Cordus seem to be escaping them. There was a great question under debate, whether the accused should lose the right of death; while it is being deliberated, while the accusers approach a second time, he had absolved himself. 8. Do you see, Marcia, what great reversals of unjust times burst out of the unforeseen? You weep that one of yours had to die? It was all but not allowed!

Besides this — that all the future is uncertain, and the more surely so toward the worse — the road to the gods above is easiest for souls quickly released from human commerce; for they have drawn the least dregs and weight. Set free before they harden and conceive the earthly too deeply, they fly back the lighter to their origin, and the more easily wash off whatever there is of the worn and smeared. 2. Nor is the delay in the body ever dear to great spirits: they yearn to go out and break free, they bear these straits ill, used to wander through all, sublime and from on high accustomed to look down on human things. Hence it is that Plato cries: the whole soul of the wise man strains toward death, wills this, meditates this, is borne by this desire ever, stretching toward what is outside. 3. What? You, Marcia, when you saw in a youth an old man’s prudence, a mind victor over all pleasures, corrected, free of vice, seeking riches without avarice, honors without ambition, pleasures without excess — did you think you could long keep him safe and sound for you? Whatever has come to the top is near its setting. Perfect virtue snatches itself away and is carried out of our eyes, nor do the things that ripened in their first season wait for the last. 4. The brighter a fire has shone, the sooner it is quenched; longer-lived is the one that, joined to a slow and difficult fuel and sunk in smoke, shines out of the murk; for the same cause holds it that grudgingly feeds it. So the more brilliant talents, the briefer; for where there is no room for increase, the fall is near. 5. Fabianus tells — what our parents too saw — that there was at Rome a boy of the stature of a tall man; but he soon died, and no prudent man failed to say beforehand that he would soon die; for he could not reach the age he had outrun. So it is: too much ripeness is the sign of imminent ruin; the end draws near when the increases are spent.

Begin to value him by his virtues, not his years; he has lived long enough. Left a ward under guardians’ care up to his fourteenth year, he was under his mother’s tutelage always. Though he had his own household, he would not leave yours, and in his mother’s company — when children scarce bear their father’s — he persevered. A young man of stature, of beauty, of sure bodily strength, born for the camp, he refused military service, that he might not part from you. 2. Reckon, Marcia, how rarely those who dwell in separate houses see their children; consider how all those years are lost to mothers, and spent in anxiety, in which they have their sons in the army: you will know this time stretched wide, from which you lost nothing. He never withdrew from your sight; under your eyes he formed his studies of outstanding genius, and would have equaled his grandfather, had not modesty stood in the way — which by its silence has held back the advance of many. 3. A young man of the rarest beauty, amid so great a throng of women who corrupt men, he offered himself to the hope of none, and when the shamelessness of some had gone so far as to make trial of him, he blushed as though he had sinned, that he had pleased. By this holiness of character he brought it about that, while still quite a boy, he seemed worthy of the priesthood — by his mother’s canvassing, no doubt, but not even a mother would have availed except for a good candidate. 4. In contemplation of these virtues, carry your son as though in your bosom! Now he is more at leisure for you, now he has nothing to call him away; never will he be to you a care, never a grief. The one thing you could grieve over in so good a son, you have grieved; the rest, exempt from chance, is full of pleasure — if only you know how to use your son, if only you understand what was most precious in him. 5. Only the image of your son has perished, and an effigy none too like; he himself is eternal, and now in a better state, stripped of others’ burdens and left to himself. These things you see set about us — the bones and sinews and the skin drawn over, the face and the serving hands and the rest in which we are wrapped — are the chains and the darkness of souls. The soul is buried by them, choked, stained, shut off from the true and its own, cast into the false. Its whole struggle is with this heavy flesh, lest it be dragged off and sink; it strives toward the place from which it was let down. There an eternal rest awaits it, gazing, out of the confused and the gross, on the pure and the clear.

Therefore there is no reason to run to your son’s tomb; his worst part, and the most troublesome to him, lies there, the bones and ashes, no more parts of him than were his clothes and the other coverings of the body. Whole, and leaving nothing of himself on earth, he has fled and wholly departed; and lingering a little above us, while he is cleansed and shakes off the clinging vices and all the rust of mortal age, then, raised to the heights, he runs among the happy souls. A sacred company received him, the Scipios and the Catos, and among the despisers of life and those freed by poison, your father, Marcia. 2. He draws his grandson to him — though there all are kin to all — rejoicing in the new light, and teaches him the courses of the neighboring stars, and gladly, not from conjecture but from the truth, expert in all, leads him into the secrets of nature; and as a guide through unknown cities is welcome to a stranger, so to one inquiring the causes of the heavenly things he is a household interpreter. He bids him let his gaze down into the depths of the earth; for it delights to look back from on high at what is left behind. 3. So bear yourself, Marcia, as though set under the eyes of your father and your son — not those you knew, but so much loftier and placed on the heights. Blush to think anything lowly or common, or to weep for your kin changed for the better! Through the free and vast spaces of eternal things they are let loose; no seas spread between divide them, nor the height of mountains or trackless valleys or the shoals of the shifting Syrtes: there all is level, and they are nimble and unhampered and pass freely through one another, mingled with the stars.

Suppose, then, Marcia, that from that heavenly citadel your father — who had as much authority with you as you with your son — not with that genius by which he bewailed the civil wars, by which he himself proscribed forever the proscribers, but loftier by as much as he is himself more sublime, says: 2. "Why, daughter, does so long a sickness of grief hold you? Why do you dwell in such ignorance of the truth as to judge it unfairly done with your son, because, the house’s state being whole, he himself whole withdrew to his ancestors? Do you not know with what storms Fortune disorders all things? How to none has she shown herself kind and easy but to those who had least to do with her? Shall I name you kings who would have been most fortunate had death sooner withdrawn them from the evils pressing on? Or Roman generals, of whose greatness nothing would be lacking, if you took something from their span? Or the noblest and most illustrious men, bowing their necks set for the stroke of a soldier’s sword? 3. Look at your father and your grandfather: the one came into the power of a foreign assassin; I allowed no one any power over me, and, cutting off my food, showed that I had written with as great a spirit as I seemed to. Why is the one mourned longest in our house who died most happily? We all gather into one, and we see, not wrapped in deep night, that with you there is nothing, as you suppose, worth wishing for, nothing high, nothing splendid, but all things low and heavy and anxious, and discerning how small a part of our light! 4. Shall I say that here there are no arms raging in mutual onset, no fleets shattering fleets, no parricides either feigned or thought, no forums roaring with lawsuits days on end, nothing in the dark, minds laid bare and hearts open, life lived in the public and the midst, and the prospect of every age and of those to come? "It delighted me to set in order the deeds of a single age, done in the farthest part of the world and among the very fewest. So many ages, the woven series of so many generations, all the years there are, I may now survey; I may look ahead to kingdoms about to rise, to kingdoms about to fall, and the collapses of great cities and the new courses of the sea. 6. For if the common fate can be any solace for your longing: nothing will stand where it stands; antiquity will lay all low and bear all off with it. And it will sport not with men alone — for how small a portion is that of fortune’s power? — but with places, with regions, with the parts of the world. It will press down whole mountains, and elsewhere force new crags into the height; it will swallow seas, turn rivers aside, and, the commerce of nations broken, dissolve the fellowship and the gathering of the human race; elsewhere it will draw cities down into vast chasms, shake them with tremors, and from the depths send up the breath of pestilence, and cover with floods whatever is inhabited, and kill every living thing, the world submerged, and scorch and burn up mortal things with vast fires. 7. And when the time comes for the world to put itself out, that it may renew itself, those things will fall by their own strength, and stars will rush on stars, and, with all matter ablaze, in one fire whatever now shines in its order will burn. We too, happy souls and allotted the eternal, when it shall seem good to god to set these things in motion again, amid the fall of all things will ourselves, a small addition to the immense ruin, be turned back into our ancient elements."