[…] if you compare them with ours, they are firm; but if you bring them back to the condition of nature, which destroys all things and recalls them to the place from which it brought them forth, they are perishable. For what immortal thing have mortal hands made? Those seven wonders, and anything far more wondrous than these that the ambition of later years has raised, will one day be seen leveled with the ground. So it is: nothing is everlasting, few things are long-lasting; one thing is frail in one way, another in another, the ways things end are various — but whatever has begun also ceases. Some threaten the very universe with destruction, and this whole, which embraces all things divine and human, if you think it right to believe it, some day will scatter and sink back into the old chaos and darkness. Let someone go now and bewail individual souls; let him lament the ashes of Carthage and Numantia and Corinth, and whatever else has fallen from a greater height — when even this, which has nowhere to fall, is destined to perish. Let someone go and complain that the fates, which one day will dare so great an outrage, did not spare him. Who is of so proud and ungoverned an arrogance that, amid this necessity of nature which recalls all things to the same end, he should wish himself alone and his own to be set apart, and would withdraw some single house from the ruin that threatens the very universe? The greatest consolation, then, is to reflect that what has befallen oneself is what all before us have suffered and all will suffer; and so it seems to me that nature made what she had made heaviest a thing held in common, so that equality might console the cruelty of fate.

This too will help you not a little: to reflect that your grief will profit nothing, neither him whom you long for nor yourself; for you will not want a thing to last long that is fruitless. For if we are to gain anything by sorrow, I do not refuse to pour out for your fortune whatever tears my own has left me; I shall find even now, through these eyes already drained by weeping at home, something to flow, if only it will do you good. Why do you hold back? Let us make our complaint — indeed, let me take up this suit as my own: "Fortune, most unjust in the judgment of all, until now you seemed to have kept this man in your bosom — a man who by your gift had won such reverence that, what has fallen to few, his good fortune escaped envy. Look: you have stamped on him the greatest grief he could receive while Caesar is safe, and after going carefully all around him you understood that on this side alone he lay open to your blows. For what else could you do to him? Snatch away his money? He was never in its power; even now, so far as he can, he drives it from him, and amid such ease in acquiring it he seeks no greater profit from it than the contempt of it. Snatch away his friends? You knew him to be so lovable that he could easily put others in the place of those he lost; for of all those I have seen powerful in the imperial house, this one alone I seem to have known whom, though it is to everyone’s advantage to have him for a friend, it is even more a pleasure to. Snatch away his good name? It stands too solidly with him to be shaken even by you. Snatch away his good health? You knew his mind to be so grounded in the liberal studies — in which he was not merely nurtured but born — that it rose above all the body’s pains. Snatch away his breath? How little you would have harmed him! Fame has promised his genius the longest span; he himself has seen to it that he endures in the better part of himself, and by composing illustrious works of eloquence has claimed himself back from mortality. As long as there is any honor for letters, as long as the power of the Latin tongue or the grace of the Greek shall stand, he will flourish among the greatest men, with whose genius he has either matched himself or — if his modesty refuses that — has attached himself. This, then, is the one thing you devised: how you might most hurt him; for the better each man is, the more often he is accustomed to bear you, who rage without any discrimination and must be feared even amid your own benefits. How small a thing it would have been for you to keep free from this injury a man on whom your kindness seemed to have come by a fixed plan, and not, after your manner, to have fallen by chance!"

Let us add, if you will, to these complaints the nature of the young man himself, cut off amid its first growth: he was worthy of you as a brother. You at least were most worthy of one for whom you would grieve nothing even in an unworthy brother; the testimony of all men is rendered to him alike: he is missed to your honor, praised to his own. There was nothing in him that you would not gladly acknowledge. You indeed would have been good even to a less good brother, but in him your devotion, having found fit material, exercised itself far more freely. No one felt his power through injury; never did he threaten anyone with you for his brother; he had shaped himself to the model of your moderation, and considered how much you were both an ornament and a burden to your own: he proved equal to that load. O harsh fates, fair to no virtues! Before your brother had come to know his own good fortune, he was taken away. I know I show too little indignation; for nothing is harder than to find words equal to a great grief. Yet even now, if we can accomplish anything, let us make our complaint: "What did you mean, Fortune, so unjust and so violent? So quickly did you repent of your own kindness? What cruelty is this — to make an assault into the very midst of brothers, and by so bloody a robbery to diminish a company most harmonious, to throw into disorder a house so well thronged with excellent young men, degenerate in no brother, and to thin it without any cause! Is innocence, then, exacted to every law, of no avail — nothing the old frugality, nothing the supreme self-restraint preserved amid supreme power and the highest fortune, nothing the pure and safe love of letters, nothing a mind void of every stain? Polybius mourns, and, warned by the one brother what he may fear concerning the rest, he is afraid even of the very consolations of his grief. An unworthy deed! Polybius mourns, and grieves over something while Caesar is gracious to him! This, beyond doubt, ungoverned Fortune, you were angling for: to show that no one can be defended against you, not even by Caesar."

We can accuse the fates longer; change them we cannot: they stand hard and inexorable; no one moves them by reproach, no one by weeping, no one by pleading; they spare no one anything, ever, nor relent. Therefore let us spare our tears, which accomplish nothing; for that grief will sooner add us to the dead than bring them back to us. And if it tortures us without helping, it must be laid aside at the very first opportunity, and the mind recalled from empty solaces and from a certain bitter appetite for grieving. For unless reason sets an end to our tears, fortune will not. Come, look around at every mortal: everywhere there is abundant and unceasing matter for weeping. Laborious need calls one to his daily toil; ambition, never at rest, harries another; another fears the riches he had prayed for and is tormented by his own wish; loneliness tortures one, the crowd forever besieging his doorway another; this man grieves that he has children, that man that he has lost them: tears will fail us before causes for grieving. Do you not see what kind of life nature has promised us — nature, who willed that the first thing in men being born should be weeping? With this beginning we are brought forth; to this the whole order of the following years answers. Thus we pass our life, and so what must often be done ought to be done by us with measure; and looking back at how much of sad things looms behind us, we ought, if not to end our tears, at least to keep them in reserve. Nothing should be husbanded more than this, of which the use is so frequent.

This too will help you not a little: to reflect that your grief is welcome to no one less than to him to whom it seems to be rendered; either he does not want you tortured, or he does not perceive it. There is therefore no sense in that service which, to the one for whom it is performed, is superfluous if he feels nothing, unwelcome if he feels. That there is no one in the whole world who takes delight in your tears, I would boldly say. What then? The mind that no one bears against you — do you believe your brother bears it, so as to hurt you by your own torment, to wish to draw you away from your occupations, that is, from your studies and from Caesar? This is not like the truth. For he showed you indulgence as to a brother, reverence as to a parent, deference as to a superior; he wishes to be your longing, not your torment. What good is it, then, to waste away with a grief which — if the dead have any feeling — your brother desires to see ended? Of another brother, whose wishes might seem uncertain, I would put all this in doubt and say: "Whether your brother desires you to be tortured by tears that never cease — he is unworthy of this feeling of yours; or he does not want it — then dismiss the grief that clings to you both; an undutiful brother ought not to be missed so, and a dutiful one would not wish it." But in his case, whose devotion is so well proven, it must be held for certain that nothing can be more bitter to him than if this loss of him is bitter to you — if it tortures you in any way, if it both troubles and drains your eyes, most undeserving of this evil, with no end of weeping. Yet nothing will draw your devotion away from tears so useless so much as the thought that you ought to be an example to your brothers of bearing this injury of fortune bravely. What great generals do when affairs are desperate — deliberately feign cheerfulness and hide their reverses under a counterfeit gladness, lest the soldiers’ spirits, if they see their general’s mind broken, themselves collapse — that you too must now do: put on a face unlike your mind, and, if you can, cast out all your grief entirely; if not, hide it within and hold it in, that it not show; and take care that your brothers imitate you, who will think honorable whatever they see you doing, and will take their spirit from your face. You must be both their solace and their consoler; but you will not be able to stand against their mourning, if you have indulged your own.

This consideration too can keep you from excessive mourning: if you remind yourself that none of the things you do can be concealed. The consensus of men has laid a great role upon you: this you must keep up. All that throng of consolers stands about you and probes your mind and discerns how much strength it has against grief — whether you only know how to use prosperity deftly, or can also bear adversity like a man: your eyes are being watched. All things are freer for those whose feelings can be hidden; for you no privacy is free. Fortune has set you in a great light; all will know how you have borne yourself in this wound of yours, whether at the first blow you lowered your arms or stood your ground. Long since both Caesar’s love has raised you to a higher rank and your studies have brought you up to it. Nothing plebeian becomes you, nothing low. And what is so low and womanish as to give oneself up to be consumed by grief? The same is not permitted to you, in an equal grief, as to your brothers; the opinion received about your studies and your character forbids you much; men demand much of you, expect much. If you wanted everything permitted to you, you should not have turned all faces toward yourself; now you must make good as much as you have promised. All those who praise the works of your genius, who copy them, who have no need of your fortune but need your genius — they are the guardians of your mind. You can never do anything so unworthy of the profession of a finished and learned man without making many repent of their admiration for you. You are not permitted to weep beyond measure — and not this alone is forbidden you: you are not permitted even to prolong your sleep into part of the day, or to flee from the press of affairs into the quiet leisure of the country, or to refresh a body wearied by the unbroken post of laborious duty with a pleasure-trip, or to hold your mind with the variety of the shows, or to order your day at your own discretion. Much is not permitted to you that is permitted to the lowliest and to those lying in a corner: a great fortune is a great servitude. You are not permitted to do anything at your own discretion: so many thousands of men must be given a hearing, so many petitions disposed of; so great a heap of business converging from the whole world, that it may be laid in due order before the mind of the greatest princeps, must be worked through. You are not permitted, I say, to weep: that you may hear the many who weep, that you may dry the tears of those in peril and longing to reach the mercy of the gentlest Caesar, your own tears must be dried up.

These remedies, however, are still the lighter ones to help you; when you would forget all things, think of Caesar. Consider how great a loyalty you owe to his indulgence toward you, how great a diligence: you will understand that you are no more permitted to stoop than he — if indeed any such is handed down in the tales — on whose shoulders the world rests. Even to Caesar himself, to whom all is permitted, for this very reason much is not permitted: his watching guards the sleep of all, his toil the leisure of all, his diligence the pleasures of all, his occupation the holiday of all. From the moment Caesar dedicated himself to the world, he tore himself from himself; and like the stars, which restless ever unwind their courses, he is never permitted to halt or to do anything of his own. To a certain degree, then, the same necessity is laid on you too: you are not permitted to look to your own interests, to your own studies. While Caesar possesses the world, you cannot give yourself over to pleasure or to grief or to any other thing: you owe yourself wholly to Caesar. Add now that, since you always proclaim Caesar dearer to you than your own breath, it is not right for you, while Caesar is safe, to complain of fortune: while he is unharmed your own are safe to you, you have lost nothing; not only ought your eyes to be dry, but even glad; in him are all things for you, he stands in the place of all. And — a thing far from your most modest and most dutiful feelings — you are too little grateful for your own good fortune, if you allow yourself to weep at all while he is safe.

I will point out now a remedy not indeed stronger, but more familiar to you. Whenever you withdraw to your home, then is the time you must fear sadness: for as long as you gaze upon your divinity, it will find no access to you, Caesar will hold all of you; when you have left him, then, as if the chance were given, grief will lie in wait for your solitude and creep little by little upon your resting mind. Therefore there is no reason to let any time stand empty of studies: then let your letters, so long and so faithfully loved, repay you the favor; then let them claim you as their high priest and worshiper; then let Homer and Virgil — who have deserved as well of the human race as you have deserved both of them and of all men, you who willed them to be known to more than they had written for — linger long with you: safe will be all the time you have entrusted to their keeping. Then compose, as far as you can, the deeds of your Caesar, that through all ages they may be told by a herald of his own household: for he himself will give you both the material and the model for shaping and recording his achievements best. I do not dare to lead you so far as to weave together fables too, and Aesopic tales — a work untried by Roman talents — with your usual grace. It is hard indeed for a mind so violently stricken to come so soon to these more cheerful studies: yet take it for proof that it is already braced and restored to itself, if it can pass from the more severe writings to these freer ones. For in the former, sick though it still is and struggling with itself, the very austerity of the matters it handles will draw it off; the latter, which must be composed with an unfurrowed brow, it will not bear until it has wholly settled with itself on every side. So you will have to exercise it first with sterner material, then temper it with the more cheerful.

This too will be a great relief to you, if you often ask yourself thus: "Do I grieve on my own account, or on his who has died? If on my own, the parade of affection collapses, and the grief — excused on this one ground, that it is honorable — begins, when it looks to self-interest, to fall away from devotion; and nothing less befits a good man than to cast up accounts in mourning for a brother. If I grieve on his account, I must judge one or the other of these two things to be true: for if no feeling remains to the dead, my brother has escaped all the troubles of life and has been restored to that place where he was before he was born, and, free of every evil, he fears nothing, desires nothing, suffers nothing: what madness is this, that I should never cease grieving for him who will never grieve? If the dead have some feeling, then now my brother’s soul, released as from a long imprisonment, at last its own master and at its own disposal, exults, and enjoys the spectacle of nature, and looks down on all things human from a higher place, while the divine — whose reason it had so long sought in vain — it contemplates more closely. Why, then, do I waste myself in longing for one who is either blessed or nothing? To weep for the blessed is envy; for the nonexistent, madness." Or does this move you, that he seems to have been deprived of vast goods, and just when they were flooding most thickly about him? When you have considered how many things he has lost, consider how many more he does not fear: anger will not torture him, sickness will not afflict him, suspicion will not provoke him, envy — devouring and ever hostile to others’ advances — will not hound him, fear will not harass him, the fickleness of Fortune, swiftly transferring her gifts, will not unsettle him. If you reckon well, more has been remitted to him than snatched away. He will not enjoy wealth, nor your favor and his own together; he will not receive benefits, nor confer them: do you think him wretched, because he has lost these things, or blessed, because he does not long for them? Believe me, he is the happier for whom fortune is superfluous than he for whom it is at hand. All those goods that delight us with a showy but deceiving pleasure — money, rank, power, and many others, at which the blind greed of the human race stands agape — are possessed with toil, beheld with envy, and in the end weigh down the very men they adorn; they threaten more than they profit; they are slippery and uncertain, never well held; for even granting that nothing be feared from time to come, the very keeping of a great prosperity is itself anxious. If you will believe those who look deeper into the truth, all life is a punishment: cast into this deep and restless sea, ebbing and flowing with alternate tides, now lifting us with sudden gains, now bearing us down with greater losses and tossing us ceaselessly, we stand in no fixed place; we hang and we surge and we are dashed one against another, and now and then we make shipwreck, and always we are afraid. For those sailing on this sea, so stormy and exposed to every tempest, there is no harbor but death. So do not envy your brother: he is at rest. At last he is free, at last safe, at last eternal. He leaves Caesar surviving, and all his offspring; he leaves you surviving, with your common brothers. Before Fortune changed anything of her favor, he left her still standing and heaping her gifts with a full hand. He enjoys now the open and free sky; from the low and sunken place he has darted up into that region — whatever it is — that receives souls loosed from their chains into a blessed embrace, and now he wanders there freely and surveys all the goods of nature with the highest pleasure. You are mistaken: your brother has not lost the light, but has been allotted a purer one. The road there is common to us all: why do we weep over the fates? He has not left us, but gone before. There is, believe me, great happiness in the very necessity of dying. Nothing is certain even for a whole day: who, amid a truth so dark and tangled, can divine whether death has grudged your brother, or taken thought for him?

This too — given the justice you show in all things — must help you, when you reflect that no injury was done you in losing such a brother, but a benefit given: that for so long you were permitted to use and enjoy his devotion. He is unfair who does not leave the giver free judgment over his own gift; greedy, who counts not as profit what he received, but as loss what he gave back. He is ungrateful who calls the end of a pleasure an injury; foolish, who thinks there is no profit in goods except present ones — who does not also find rest in things past and judge surer those that are gone, because of them there is no fear that they may cease. He too narrowly confines his joys who thinks he enjoys only what he has and sees, and counts it as nothing to have had the same; for every pleasure leaves us quickly, which flows and passes and is snatched away almost before it comes. So the mind must be sent back into time past, and whatever ever delighted us must be brought back and handled over and over in thought: the memory of pleasures is longer and more faithful than their presence. That you had, then, the best of brothers — set it among your highest goods! There is no reason to consider how much longer you might have had him, but how long you did. Nature gave him to you, as she gives men their brothers, not in outright ownership, but on loan; then, when it seemed good to her, she called him back, following not your satiety in him but her own law. If a man should take it ill to have repaid borrowed money — money, above all, whose use he had received free of charge — would he not be held an unjust man? Nature gave your brother life, gave it to you as well; and if, using her own right, she has called in her debt sooner from whom she pleased, the fault is not hers, whose terms were known, but the greedy hope of the mortal mind, which keeps forgetting what nature is, and never remembers its own lot except when it is reminded. Rejoice, then, that you had so good a brother, and make the best of the use and enjoyment of him, though it was shorter than your wish. Reflect that it was most delightful, what you had; merely human, what you have lost: for nothing is less consistent with itself than for a man to be moved that such a brother fell to him for too short a time, and not to rejoice that he fell to him at all.

"But he was snatched away when I did not expect it." Each man is deceived by his own credulity, and, in the things he loves, by a willing forgetfulness of mortality: nature has declared that she will grant no one a remission of her necessity. Daily, before our eyes, the funerals of the known and the unknown pass by; yet we are busy with other things, and think that sudden which our whole life proclaims will come. It is not, then, an injustice of the fates, but the perversity of the human mind, insatiable of all things, which is indignant to fall away from a place it entered only on sufferance. How much juster was the man who, when his son’s death was announced, uttered words worthy of a great man: "When I begot him, I knew then that he would die." You will hardly wonder that from such a man was born one who could die bravely. He did not take the news of his son’s death as something new; for what is new in a man’s dying, whose whole life is nothing but a journey to death? "When I begot him, I knew then that he would die." Then he added a thing of greater wisdom and greater spirit: "and for this I reared him." We are all reared for this; whoever is brought forth to life is marked out for death. Let us take joy in what will be given, and give it back when it is demanded again: the fates will lay hold of one at one time, another at another; they will pass no one by. Let the mind stand ready under arms, and never fear what is inevitable, always expect what is uncertain. Why should I speak of generals and the offspring of generals, men marked by many consulships or triumphs, finished off by an inexorable lot? Whole kingdoms with their kings, peoples with their nations, have borne their doom: all men — nay, all things — look toward their last day. The end is not the same for all: life deserts one in mid-course, abandons another at the very entrance, scarcely releases another in extreme old age, already wearied and longing to depart; at one time and another, yet all of us make for the same place; whether it is more foolish to be ignorant of the law of mortality, or more shameless to refuse it, I do not know. Come, take up in your hands those poems of either author, made famous by the great labor of your genius — the poems you have so unbound that, though their structure has fallen away, their grace yet remains (for you carried them across from one tongue into another so that, the hardest thing of all, all their excellences followed you into a foreign speech): there will be no book in those writings that will not furnish you with abundant examples of human change, of uncertain chances, and of tears flowing from one cause and another. Read with what spirit you thundered in mighty words: you will be ashamed to fail all at once and to fall away from so great a grandeur of speech. Do not bring it about that anyone who has just now admired your writings as a model should ask how so fragile a mind conceived things so grand and so solid.

Rather turn yourself from these things that torture you to the many and great things that console, and look to your excellent brothers, look to your wife, look to your son: for the safety of all these, Fortune has settled with you at this price. You have many in whom to find rest. Clear yourself of this disgrace: that it not seem to all that one grief weighs more with you than these so many consolations. You see all these stricken together with you, and you understand that they cannot come to your aid — indeed, that they themselves are waiting to be relieved by you; and therefore, the less learning and the less genius there is in them, the more you must set yourself against the common evil. It is itself a kind of consolation to divide one’s grief among many; for since it is shared out among several, it ought to settle on you in a slight portion. I will not cease offering you Caesar again and again: while he governs the lands and shows how much better empire is guarded by benefits than by arms, while he presides over human affairs, there is no danger that you should feel you have lost anything; in him alone there is protection enough for you, and consolation enough. Lift yourself up, and as often as tears well up in your eyes, so often turn them toward Caesar: they will be dried by the sight of that greatest and most glorious divinity; his radiance will so dazzle them that they can look at nothing else, and will hold them fixed upon himself. He must be in your thoughts — he whom you gaze upon by day and by night, from whom you never lower your mind; he must be summoned to your side against fortune. And I do not doubt, given his great gentleness and indulgence toward all his own, that he has already covered over this wound of yours with many consolations, already heaped up many things to stand in the way of your grief. What more? Even had he done none of these things, is not the very sight of Caesar — by itself alone, or even the thought of him — the greatest consolation to you? May the gods and goddesses lend him long to the earth! May he equal the deeds of the deified Augustus, and surpass his years! As long as he is among mortals, may he feel that nothing in his own house is mortal! May he prove, by long fidelity, his son a ruler for the Roman empire, and see him a partner of his father before a successor! Late, and known only to our grandchildren, be the day on which his line claims him for heaven!

Keep your hands off this man, Fortune, and show your power over him only in that part where you do good! Let him heal the human race, sick and stricken now this long while; let him restore and set back in its place whatever the madness of the former princeps shattered! May this star, which has shone out upon a world hurled into the depths and sunk in darkness, shine forever! May he pacify Germany, open up Britain, and lead both his father’s triumphs and new ones of his own: and that I too shall be a spectator of them, his clemency promises — the clemency that holds the first place among his virtues. For he did not so cast me down as to be unwilling to raise me up — nay, he did not even cast me down, but caught me as I was driven by fortune and falling, and as I went headlong he set me down gently, using the restraint of a divine hand: he interceded for me with the senate, and not only gave me my life but even asked for it. Let him see to it: let him judge my case to be of whatever sort he will; let either his justice discern it to be good, or his clemency make it good: either way his benefit will be the same to me, whether he knows me to be innocent or wishes me so. Meanwhile it is a great solace for my miseries to see his mercy roaming the whole world: and since, from the very corner in which I am fixed, it has dug out and brought back into the light many men buried under the downfall of many years already, I do not fear that it will pass me alone by. He himself best knows the time at which he ought to come to each man’s aid; I will take all pains that he need not blush to reach me. O happy clemency of yours, Caesar, which brings it about that exiles live a calmer life under you than leading men lately lived under Gaius! They do not tremble, nor await the sword from hour to hour, nor take fright at the sight of every ship; through you they have both a limit to fortune’s raging and a hope of the same fortune bettered, and present peace. You may be sure that those thunderbolts alone are most just which even the stricken revere.

This princeps, then, who is the common solace of all men — unless everything deceives me — has already revived your spirit and applied to so great a wound remedies greater still. Already he has braced you in every way, already with his most tenacious memory he has recalled all the examples by which you might be driven to evenness of mind, already with his accustomed eloquence he has set out the precepts of all the wise. No one, therefore, could take up better this office of consoling: words will carry another weight when he speaks them, as if sent from an oracle; his divine authority will crush all the force of your grief. Imagine, then, that he says this to you: "Fortune has not singled out you alone, to afflict with so grievous an injury; there is not, nor has there been, a single house in all the world without some lamentation. I will pass over the common examples, which, though smaller, are yet beyond number, and will lead you to the public registers and annals. Do you see all these portrait-masks that have filled the hall of the Caesars? There is not one of them not marked by some misfortune of its own kin; not one of those men, shining as an ornament of the ages, but was either tortured by longing for his own, or longed for by his own with the greatest anguish of mind. Why should I recount to you Scipio Africanus, to whom his brother’s death was announced while he himself was in exile? That brother, who had snatched his brother from prison, could not snatch him from fate; and how impatient of equal law the devotion of Africanus was became clear to all: for on the same day on which Scipio Africanus had wrested his brother from the bailiff’s hands, he, a private citizen, set himself even against the tribune of the plebs. Yet he mourned his brother with as great a spirit as he had defended him. Why should I recount Scipio Aemilianus, who at almost one and the same time looked upon his father’s triumph and the funerals of his two brothers? Yet, a mere youth, and almost a boy, he bore the sudden devastation of his family — collapsing at the very moment of Paulus’s triumph — with as great a spirit as a man ought to bear it who was born for this: that the city of Rome should never lack a Scipio, nor Carthage outlast it.

Why should I recount the harmony of the two Luculli, severed by death? Why the Pompeys? To whom raging fortune did not leave even this, that they should fall in one and the same ruin: Sextus Pompeius lived first surviving his sister, by whose death the bonds of a Roman peace most firmly knit were loosed, and this same man lived surviving his excellent brother, whom fortune had raised so high only that she might cast him down no less deep than she had cast down his father; and yet after this fall Sextus Pompeius proved equal not only to grief but even to war. Countless examples of brothers parted by death rise up on every side — nay, on the contrary, scarcely any such pairs have ever been seen growing old together; but I will be content with the examples of our own house. For no one will be so devoid of feeling and sense as to complain that Fortune has brought mourning on anyone, when he knows that she has coveted even the tears of the Caesars. The deified Augustus lost Octavia, his dearest sister, and nature did not take away the necessity of mourning even from him for whom she had destined heaven; indeed the same man, harried by every kind of bereavement, lost his sister’s son, prepared for his own succession; in short — not to enumerate his griefs one by one — he lost sons-in-law and children and grandchildren, and no one of all mortals felt more, while he was among men, that he was a man. Yet his heart, most capacious of all things, took in griefs so many and so great, and the deified Augustus was conqueror not only of foreign nations but also of his sorrows. Gaius Caesar, grandson of the deified Augustus my great-uncle, around the first years of his youth, prince of the youth, lost his dearest brother Lucius, prince of the same youth, amid the preparations for the Parthian war, and was struck by a far heavier wound of the mind than afterward of the body; and both blows he bore at once most dutifully and most bravely. Tiberius Caesar, my uncle, lost Drusus Germanicus, my father, his younger brother, who was opening up the heart of Germany and subjecting the fiercest nations to the Roman empire — lost him in his very embrace and amid his kisses: yet he set a limit to mourning not only for himself but for others too, and brought the whole army — not only grief-struck but thunderstruck, and claiming for itself the body of its own Drusus — back to the Roman manner of mourning, and judged that discipline was to be kept not only in soldiering but also in grieving. He could not have checked others’ tears, had he not first pressed down his own.

Mark Antony, my grandfather — inferior to no one except him by whom he was conquered — at the very time when he was ordering the commonwealth and, vested with triumviral power, saw nothing above him, and, save for his two colleagues, beheld all things below him, heard that his brother had been killed. Ungoverned Fortune, what games you make for yourself out of human ills! At the very time when Mark Antony sat as arbiter of the life and death of his fellow citizens, Mark Antony’s brother was being ordered led off to execution! Yet Mark Antony bore this so sad a wound with the same greatness of spirit with which he had endured all his other reverses, and this was his way of mourning: to make funeral offering to his brother with the blood of twenty legions. But — to pass over all other examples, and to be silent about the other deaths in my own family too — twice has fortune assailed me with a brother’s death, twice has she understood that I can be hurt, but not conquered: I lost my brother Germanicus, and how I loved him surely understands anyone who considers how dutiful brothers love their own; yet so governed I my feeling that I neither left undone anything that ought to be required of a good brother, nor did anything that could be blamed in a princeps." Imagine, then, that the public father recounts these examples to you, and shows you how nothing is sacred or untouched to Fortune, who has dared to lead out funerals from those households from which she was going to seek out gods. Let no one wonder, then, that anything is done by her either cruelly or unjustly; for can she know any fairness or any restraint toward private houses, whose implacable savagery has so often defiled the very couches of the gods? Though we heap reproach on her not only with our own mouth but with the public’s too, still she will not be changed; against all prayers and all complaints she will press her own course. This Fortune has been in human affairs, and this she will be: she has left nothing undared by herself, she will leave nothing untouched; she will go on more violently through all things, as she has always been wont, daring for injury’s sake to enter even those houses to which the way lies through temples, and she will clothe in black the laurel-wreathed doors. This one thing let us obtain from her by public vows and prayers — if it has not yet pleased her to consume the human race, if she still looks with favor on the Roman name: may she be willing that this princeps, given to the fallen fortunes of men, be sacred to her as he is to all mortals! Let her learn clemency from him, and become gentle toward the gentlest of all princes!

You ought, therefore, to look upon all those I recounted a little while ago, either taken up into heaven or next to it, and to bear with even mind that Fortune stretches her hands toward you too — hands she does not withhold even from those by whom we swear; you ought to imitate their firmness in enduring and overcoming griefs, so far as it is right for a man to walk in the footsteps of the divine. Although in other matters there are great distinctions of rank and nobility, virtue is set in the midst: she disdains no one who only judges himself worthy of her. Best of all, surely, you will imitate those who, though they might have been indignant at not being themselves exempt from this evil, nevertheless judged that to be leveled with other men in this one thing was not an injury but the law of mortality, and bore what had happened neither too bitterly and harshly, nor softly and like women; for not to feel one’s own ills is not human, and not to bear them is not manly. Yet I cannot, having gone round all the Caesars from whom Fortune snatched brothers and sisters, pass over one who is to be set apart from the whole number of the Caesars — one whom nature brought forth for the destruction and disgrace of the human race, by whom the empire was scorched and utterly overthrown, and which the clemency of the gentlest princeps now restores. Gaius Caesar, having lost his sister Drusilla — that man who could no more grieve than rejoice in a princely manner — fled the sight and company of his fellow citizens, did not attend his sister’s funeral, did not render his sister her due rites, but at his Alban estate, with dice and the gaming-board and other such common pastimes, sought to lighten the evils of that most bitter loss. O the shame of the empire! For a Roman princeps mourning his sister, dice were the consolation! That same Gaius, with frenzied inconstancy, now letting his beard and hair grow, now shaving them, now wandering and measuring out the coasts of Italy and Sicily, never sure enough whether he wished his sister mourned or worshiped, at the very same time when he was setting up temples and sacred couches for her, visited with most cruel punishment those who had grieved too little; for he bore the blows of adversity with the same lack of self-government with which, lifted up by the outcome of prosperity, he swelled beyond the human measure. Far be that example from every Roman man — to divert his mourning by ill-timed games, or to provoke it by the foulness of squalor and filth, or to delight it with others’ misfortunes, a solace by no means human.

But you have nothing to change from your own custom, since indeed you have set your heart on loving those studies which both exalt prosperity best and lessen calamity most easily, and which are at once a man’s greatest ornaments and his greatest solaces. Now, therefore, plunge yourself deeper into your studies, now wrap them about you like bulwarks of the mind, that grief may find no entrance from any side of you. Prolong your brother’s memory too by some monument of your writings; for this is the one work in human affairs that no storm can harm, that no age consumes. The rest — which consist in the piling of stones and masses of marble or in mounds of earth raised to a great height — do not prolong the day for long, since they too perish: but the memory of genius is immortal. This bestow on your brother; in this set him; you will better consecrate him with a genius that will endure forever than mourn him with fruitless grief. As for Fortune herself, even if her case cannot now be pleaded before you — for all those things she gave us are hateful for this very reason, that she has snatched something away — yet it will have to be pleaded when first the passing of days has made you a fairer judge of her; for then you will be able to return into favor with her. For she has provided many things by which to make this injury good, and many even now she will give, by which to redeem it; in short, this very thing she took away, she herself had given you. Do not, then, use your genius against yourself; do not take the side of your own grief. Your eloquence can indeed make what is small pass for great, and again make great things slight and reduce them to the least; but let it keep those powers for another use; now let it bring its whole self to your consolation. And yet consider whether even this itself is not already superfluous; for nature exacts something from us, but more is contracted by vanity. Never, however, will I demand of you that you not mourn at all. And I know there are found certain men of a wisdom harsh rather than brave, who deny that the wise man will grieve: these men seem to me never to have fallen into a chance of this kind, else fortune would have shaken their proud wisdom out of them and forced them, even against their will, to a confession of the truth. Reason will have done enough if it cuts away only that part of grief which is both excess and surplus: that it should suffer there to be no grief at all is neither to be hoped for by anyone nor to be desired. Let it rather keep this measure, which imitates neither undutifulness nor madness, and holds us in that bearing which belongs to a mind both dutiful and not unhinged: let the tears flow, but let them also cease; let groans be drawn from the depth of the breast, but let them also have an end; so govern your mind that you may win the approval both of the wise and of your brothers. Bring it about that you willingly let your brother’s memory come to you often, that you both honor him in your conversation and make him present to yourself by constant recollection; which you will be able to attain only if you make his memory pleasant to you rather than tearful; for it is natural that the mind always flees from that to which it returns with sadness. Think of his moderation, think of his skill in conducting affairs, his diligence in carrying them through, his constancy in his promises. Set forth all his sayings and deeds both to others and recall them to yourself. Think what he was, and what he might have been hoped to be: for what could not have been safely pledged about such a brother? These things I have composed as best I could, with a mind now grown stale and dulled by long disuse. And if they seem either to answer your genius too little, or too little to heal your grief, consider how a man cannot be free for the consoling of another whom his own ills hold preoccupied, and how Latin words do not readily come to the aid of a man around whom rings the uncouth din of barbarians — a din grievous even to barbarians of a more civilized sort.