Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
Fortune has left you two daughters, and their children: she has not
even taken away altogether him who you now mourn for, forgetful of
his elder brother: you have two daughters by him, who if you support
them ill will prove great burdens, but if well, great comforts to
you. You ought to prevail upon yourself, when you see them, to let
them remind you of your son, and not of your grief. When a husbandman’s
trees have either been torn up, roots and all, by the wind, or
broken off short by the force of a hurricane, he takes care of what
is left of their stock, straightway plants seeds or cuttings in the
place of those which he has lost, and in a moment—for time is as
swift in repairing losses as in causing them—more flourishing trees
are growing than were there before. Take, then, in the place of
your Metilius these his two daughters, and by their twofold consolation
lighten your single sorrow. True, human nature is so constituted
as to love nothing so much as what it has lost, and our yearning
after those who have been taken from us makes us judge unfairly of
those who are left to us: nevertheless, if you choose to reckon up
how merciful {185} Fortune has been to you even in her anger, you
will feel that you have more than enough to console you. Look at
all your grandchildren, and your two daughters: and say also,
Marcia:—“I should indeed be cast down, if everyone’s fortune followed
his deserts, and if no evil ever befel good men: but as it is I
perceive that no distinction is made, and that the bad and the good
are both harassed alike.”
XVII. “Still, it is a sad thing to lose a young man whom you have
brought up, just as he was becoming a defence and a pride both to
his mother and to his country.” No one denies that it is sad: but
it is the common lot of mortals. You were born to lose others, to
be lost, to hope, to fear, to destroy your own peace and that of
others, to fear and yet to long for death, and, worst of all, never
to know what your real position is. If you were about to journey
to Syracuse, and some one were to say:—“Learn beforehand all the
discomforts, and all the pleasures of your coming voyage, and then
set sail. The sights which you will enjoy will be as follows: first,
you will see the island itself, now separated from Italy by a narrow
strait, but which, we know, once formed part of the mainland. The
sea suddenly broke through, and
‘Sever’d Sicilia from the western shore.’[9]
Next, as you will be able to sail close to Charybdis, of which the
poets have sung, you will see that greediest of whirlpools, quite
smooth if no south wind be blowing, but whenever there is a gale
from that quarter, sucking down ships into a huge and deep abyss.
You will see the fountain of Arethusa, so famed in song, with its
waters bright and pellucid to the very bottom, and pouring forth
an icy stream which it either finds on the spot or else plunges it
under ground, conveys it thither as a separate river beneath so
many seas, free from any mixture of less pure water, and {186} there
brings it again to the surface. You will see a harbour which is
more sheltered than all the others in the world, whether they be
natural or improved by human art for the protection of shipping;
so safe, that even the most violent storms are powerless to disturb
it. You will see the place where the power of Athens was broken,
where that natural prison, hewn deep among precipices of rock,
received so many thousands of captives: you will see the great city
itself, occupying a wider site than many capitals, an extremely
warm resort in winter, where not a single day passes without sunshine:
but when you have observed all this, you must remember that the
advantages of its winter climate are counterbalanced by a hot and
pestilential summer: that here will be the tyrant Dionysius, the
destroyer of freedom, of justice, and of law, who is greedy of power
even after conversing with Plato, and of life even after he has
been exiled; that he will burn some, flog others, and behead others
for slight offences; that he will exercise his lust upon both sexes
. . . . . You have now heard all that can attract you thither, all
that can deter you from going: now, then, either set sail or remain
at home!” If, after this declaration, anybody were to say that he
wished to go to Syracuse, he could blame no one but himself for
what befel him there, because he would not stumble upon it unknowingly,
but would have gone thither fully aware of what was before him. To
everyone Nature says: “I do not deceive any person. If you choose
to have children, they may be handsome, or they may be deformed;
perhaps they will be born dumb. One of them may perhaps prove the
saviour of his country, or perhaps its betrayer. You need not despair
of their being raised to such honour that for their sake no one
will dare to speak evil of you: yet remember that they may reach
such a pitch of infamy as themselves to become curses to you. There
is nothing to prevent their performing the {187} last offices for
you, and your panegyric being spoken by your children: but hold
yourself prepared nevertheless to place a son as boy, man, or
greybeard, upon the funeral pyre: for years have nothing to do with
the matter, since every sort of funeral in which a parent buries
his child must alike be untimely.[10] If you still choose to rear
children, after I have explained these conditions to you, you render
yourself incapable of blaming the gods, for they never guaranteed
anything to you.”
XVIII. You may make this simile apply to your whole entrance into
life. I have explained to you what attractions and what drawbacks
there would be if you were thinking of going to Syracuse: now suppose
that I were to come and give you advice when you were going to be
born. “You are about,” I should say, “to enter a city of which both
gods and men are citizens, a city which contains the whole universe,
which is bound by irrevocable and eternal laws, and wherein the
heavenly bodies run their unwearied courses: you will see therein
innumerable twinkling stars, and the sun, whose single light pervades
every place, who by his daily course marks the times of day and
night, and by his yearly course makes a more equal division between
summer and winter. You will see his place taken by night by the
moon, who borrows at her meetings with her brother a gentle and
softer light, and who at one time is invisible, at another hangs
full-faced above the earth, ever waxing and waning, each phase
unlike the last. You will see five stars, moving in the opposite
direction to the others, stemming the whirl of the skies towards
the West: on the slightest motions of these depend the fortunes of
nations, and according as the aspect of the planets is auspicious
or malignant, the greatest empires rise and fall: you will see with
wonder the gathering clouds, the falling showers, the {188} zigzag
lightning, the crashing together of the heavens. When, sated with
the wonders above, you turn your eyes towards the earth, they will
be met by objects of a different yet equally admirable aspect: on
one side a boundless expanse of open plains, on another the towering
peaks of lofty and snow-clad mountains: the downward course of
rivers, some streams running eastward, some westward from the same
source: the woods which wave even on the mountain tops, the vast
forests with all the creatures that dwell therein, and the confused
harmony of the birds: the variously-placed cities, the nations which
natural obstacles keep secluded from the world, some of whom withdraw
themselves to lofty mountains, while others dwell in fear and
trembling on the sloping banks of rivers: the crops which are
assisted by cultivation, and the trees which bear fruit even without
it: the rivers that flow gently through the meadows, the lovely
bays and shores that curve inwards to form harbours: the countless
islands scattered over the main, which break and spangle the seas.
What of the brilliancy of stones and gems, the gold that rolls amid
the sands of rushing streams, the heaven-born fires that burst forth
from the midst of the earth and even front the midst of the sea;
the ocean itself, that binds land to land, dividing the nations by
its threefold indentations, and boiling up with mighty rage? Swimming
upon its waves, making them disturbed and swelling without wind,
you will see animals exceeding the size of any that belong to the
land, some clumsy and requiring others to guide their movements,
some swift and moving faster than the utmost efforts of rowers,
some of them that drink in the waters and blow them out again to
the great perils of those who sail near them: you will see here
ships seeking for unknown lands: you will see that man’s audacity
leaves nothing unattempted, and you will yourself be both a witness
and a sharer in great {189} attempts. You will both learn and teach
the arts by which men’s lives are supplied with necessaries, are
adorned, and are ruled: but in this same place there will be a
thousand pestilences fatal to both body and mind, there will be
wars and highway robberies, poisonings and shipwrecks, extremes of
climate and excesses of body, untimely griefs for our dearest ones,
and death for ourselves, of which we cannot tell whether it will
be easy or by torture at the hands of the executioner. Now consider
and weigh carefully in your own mind which you would choose. If you
wish to enjoy these blessings you must pass through these pains.
Do you answer that you choose to live? ‘Of course.’ Nay, I thought
you would not enter upon that of which the least diminution causes
pain. Live, then, as has been agreed on. You say, “No one has asked
my opinion.” Our parents’ opinion was taken about us, when, knowing
what the conditions of life are, they brought us into it.
XIX. But, to come to topics of consolation, in the first place
consider if you please to what our remedies must be applied, and
next, in what way. It is regret for the absence of his loved one
which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in
itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent
or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they
leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us,
therefore, is an idea. Now every evil is just as great as we consider
it to be: we have, therefore, the remedy in our own hands. Let us
suppose that they are on a journey, and let us deceive ourselves:
we have sent them away, or, rather, we have sent them on in advance
to a place whither we shall soon follow them.[11] Besides this,
mourners are wont to suffer from the thought, “I shall {190} have
no one to protect me, no one to avenge me when I am scorned.” To
use a very disreputable but very true mode of consolation, I may
say that in our country the loss of children bestows more influence
than it takes away, and loneliness, which used to bring the aged
to ruin, now makes them so powerful that some old men have pretended
to pick quarrels with their sons, have disowned their own children,
and have made themselves childless by their own act. I know what
you will say: “My own losses do not grieve me:” and indeed a man
does not deserve to be consoled if he is sorry for his son’s death
as he would be for that of a slave, who is capable of seeing anything
in his son beyond his son’s self. What then, Marcia, is it that
grieves you? is it that your son has died, or that he did not live
long? If it be his having died, then you ought always to have
grieved, for you always knew that he would die. Reflect that the
dead suffer no evils, that all those stories which make us dread
the nether world are mere fables, that he who dies need fear no
darkness, no prison, no blazing streams of fire, no river of Lethe,