Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
not able to keep silence and see Sejanus climbing up to take his
seat upon our necks, which would have been bad enough had he been
placed there by his master. He was decreed the honour of a statue,
to be set up in the theatre of Pompeius, which had been burned down
and was being restored by Caesar. Cordus exclaimed that “Now the
theatre was really destroyed.” What then? should he not burst with
spite at a Sejanus being set up over the ashes of Gnaeus Pompeius,
at a faithless soldier being commemorated within the memorial of a
consummate commander? The inscription was put up:[12] and those
keen-scented {197} hounds whom Sejanus used to feed on human blood,
to make them tame towards himself and fierce to all the world beside,
began to bay around their victim and even to make premature snaps
at him. What was he to do? If he chose to live, he must gain the
consent of Sejanus; if to die, he must gain that of his daughter;
and neither of them could have been persuaded to grant it: he
therefore determined to deceive his daughter, and having taken a
bath in order to weaken himself still further, he retired to his
bed-chamber on the pretence of taking a meal there. After dismissing
his slaves he threw some of the food out of the window, that he
might appear to have eaten it: then he took no supper, making the
excuse that he had already had enough food in his chamber. This he
continued to do on the second and the third day: the fourth betrayed
his condition by his bodily weakness; so, embracing you, “My dearest
daughter,” said he, “from whom I have never throughout your whole
life concealed aught but this, I have begun my journey towards
death, and have already travelled half-way thither. You cannot and
you ought not to call me back.” So saying he ordered all light to
be excluded from the room and shut himself up in the darkness. When
his determination became known there was a general feeling of
pleasure at the prey being snatched out of the jaws of those ravening
wolves. His prosecutors, at the instance of Sejanus, went to the
judgment-seat of the consuls, complained that Cordus was dying, and
begged the consuls to interpose to prevent his doing what they
themselves had driven him to do; so true was it that Cordus appeared
to them to be escaping: an important matter was at stake, namely,
whether the accused should lose the right to die. While this point
was being debated, and the prosecutors were going to attend the
court a second time, he had set himself free from them. Do you see,
Marcia, how suddenly evil days come upon a man? {198} and do you
weep because one of your family could not avoid dying? one of your
family was within a very little of not being allowed to die.
XXIII. Besides the fact that everything that is future is uncertain,
and the only certainty is that it is more likely to turn out ill
than well, our spirits find the path to the Gods above easiest when
it is soon allowed to leave the society of mankind, because it has
then contracted fewest impurities to weigh it down: if set free
before they become hardened worldlings, before earthly things have
sunk too deep into them, they fly all the more lightly back to the
place from whence they came, and all the more easily wash away the
stains and defilements which they may have contracted. Great minds
never love to linger long in the body: they are eager to burst its
bonds and escape from it, they chafe at the narrowness of their
prison, having been wont to wander through space, and from aloft
in the upper air to look down with contempt upon human affairs.
Hence it is that Plato declares that the wise man’s mind is entirely
given up to death, longs for it, contemplates it, and through his
eagerness for it is always striving after things which lie beyond
this life. Why, Marcia, when you saw him while yet young displaying
the wisdom of age, with a mind that could rise superior to all
sensual enjoyments, faultless and without a blemish, able to win
riches without greediness, public office without ambition, pleasure
without extravagance, did you suppose it would long be your lot to
keep him safe by your side? Whatever has arrived at perfection, is
ripe for dissolution. Consummate virtue flees away and betakes
itself out of our sight, and those things which come to maturity
in the first stage of their being do not wait for the last. The
brighter a fire glows, the sooner it goes out: it lasts longer when
it is made up with bad and slowly burning fuel, and shows a dull
light through a cloud of smoke: its being poorly fed {199} makes
it linger all the longer. So also the more brilliant men’s minds,
the shorter lived they are: for when there is no room for further
growth, the end is near. Fabianus tells us, what our parents
themselves have seen, that there was at Rome a boy of gigantic
stature, exceeding that of a man: but he soon died, and every
sensible person always said that he would soon die, for he could
not live to reach the age which he had assumed before it was due.
So it is: too complete maturity is a proof that destruction is near,
and the end approaches when growth is over.
XXIV. Begin to reckon his age, not by years, but by virtues: he
lived long enough. He was left as a ward in the care of guardians
up to his fourteenth year, and never passed out of that of his
mother: when he had a household of his own he was loth to leave
yours, and continued to dwell under his mother’s roof, though few
sons can endure to live under their father’s. Though a youth whose
height, beauty, and vigour of body destined him for the army, yet
he refused to serve, that he might not be separated from you.
Consider, Marcia, how seldom mothers who live in separate houses
see their children: consider how they lose and pass in anxiety all
those years during which they have sons in the army, and you will
see that this time, none of which you lost, was of considerable
extent: he never went out of your sight: it was under your eyes
that he applied himself to the cultivation of an admirable intellect
and one which would have rivalled that of his grandfather, had it
not been hindered by shyness, which has concealed many men’s
accomplishments: though a youth of unusual beauty, and living among
such throngs of women who made it their business to seduce men, he
gratified the wishes of none of them, and when the effrontery of
some led them so far as actually to tempt him, he blushed as deeply
at having found favour in their eyes as though he had been guilty.
By this holiness of life he caused himself, while yet quite a {200}
boy, to be thought worthy of the priesthood, which no doubt he owed
to his mother’s influence; but even his mother’s influence would
have had no weight if the candidate for whom it was exerted had
been unfit for the post. Dwell upon these virtues, and nurse your
son as it were in your lap: now he is more at leisure to respond
to your caresses, he has nothing to call him away from you, he will
never be an anxiety or a sorrow to you. You have grieved at the
only grief so good a son could cause you: all else is beyond the
power of fortune to harm, and is full of pleasure, if only you know
how to make use of your son, if you do but know what his most
precious quality was. It is merely the outward semblance of your
son that has perished, his likeness, and that not a very good one;
he himself is immortal, and is now in a far better state, set free
from the burden of all that was not his own, and left simply by
himself: all this apparatus which you see about us of bones and
sinews, this covering of skin, this face, these our servants the
hands, and all the rest of our environment, are but chains and
darkness to the soul: they overwhelm it, choke it, corrupt it, fill
it with false ideas, and keep it at a distance from its own true
sphere: it has to struggle continually against this burden of the
flesh, lest it be dragged down and sunk by it. It ever strives to
rise up again to the place from whence it was sent down on earth:
there eternal rest awaits it, there it will behold what is pure and
clear, in place of what is foul and turbid.
XXV. You need not, therefore, hasten to the burial-place of your
son: that which lies there is but the worst part of him and that
which gave him most trouble, only bones and ashes, which are no
more parts of him than clothes or other coverings of his body. He
is complete, and without leaving any part of himself behind on earth
has taken wing and gone away altogether: he has tarried a brief
space above us while his soul was being cleansed {201} and purified
from the vices and rust which all mortal lives must contract, and
from thence he will rise to the high heavens and join the souls of
the blessed: a saintly company will welcome him thither,—Scipios
and Catos; and among the rest of those who have held life cheap and
set themselves free, thanks to death, albeit all there are alike
akin, your father, Marcia, will embrace his grandson as he rejoices
in the unwonted light, will teach him the motion of the stars which
are so near to them, and introduce him with joy into all the secrets
of nature, not by guesswork but by real knowledge. Even as a stranger
is grateful to one who shows him the way about an unknown city, so
is a searcher after the causes of what he sees in the heavens to
one of his own family who can explain them to him. He will delight
in gazing deep down upon the earth, for it is a delight to look
from aloft at what one has left below. Bear yourself, therefore,
Marcia, as though you were placed before the eyes of your father
and your son, yet not such as you knew them, but far loftier beings,
placed in a higher sphere. Blush, then, to do any mean or common
action, or to weep for those your relatives who have been changed
for the better. Free to roam through the open, boundless realms of
the everliving universe, they are not hindered in their course by
intervening seas, lofty mountains, impassable valleys, or the
treacherous fiats of the Syrtes: they find a level path everywhere,
are swift and ready of motion, and are permeated in their turn by
the stars and dwell together with them.
XXVI. Imagine then, Marcia, that your father, whose influence over
you was as great as yours over your son, no longer in that frame
of mind in which he deplored the civil wars, or in which he for
ever proscribed those who would have proscribed him, but in a mood
as much more joyful as his abode now is higher than of old, is
saying, as {202} he looks down from the height of heaven, “My
daughter, why does this sorrow possess you for so long? why do you
live in such ignorance of the truth, as to think that your son has
been unfairly dealt with because he has returned to his ancestors
in his prime, without decay of body or mind, leaving his family
flourishing? Do you not know with what storms Fortune unsettles
everything? how she proves kind and compliant to none save to those
who have the fewest possible dealings with her? Need I remind you
of kings who would have been the happiest of mortals had death
sooner withdrawn them from the ruin which was approaching them? or
of Roman generals, whose greatness, had but a few years been taken
from their lives, would have wanted nothing to render it complete?
or of men of the highest distinction and noblest birth who have
calmly offered their necks to the stroke of a soldier’s sword? Look
at your father and your grandfather: the former fell into the hands
of a foreign murderer: I allowed no man to take any liberties with
me, and by abstinence from food showed that my spirit was as great
as my writings had represented it. Why, then, should that member
of our household who died most happily of all be mourned in it the
longest? We have all assembled together, and, not being plunged in