Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
their leisure, his toil ensures their pleasures, his work preserves
their holidays. On the day on which Caesar devoted his services to
the universe, he lost them for himself, and like the planets which
ever unrestingly pursue their course, he can never halt or attend
to any affair of his own. After a certain fashion this prohibition
is imposed upon you also; you may not consider your own interests,
or devote yourself to your own studies: while Caesar owns the world,
you cannot allow either joy or grief, or anything else to occupy
any part of you: you owe your entire self to Caesar. Add to this
that, since you have always declared that Caesar was dearer to you
than your own life, you have no right to complain of misfortune as
long as Caesar is alive: while he is safe all your friends are
alive, you have lost nothing, your eyes ought not only to be dry,
but glad. In him is your all, he stands in the place of all else
to you: you are not grateful enough for your present happy state
(which God forbid that one of your most wise and loyal disposition
should be) if you permit yourself to weep at all while Caesar is
safe.
VIII. I will now point out to you yet another remedy, of a more
domestic, though not of a more efficacious character. Your sorrow
is most to be feared when you have retired to your own home: for
as long as your divinity is before your eyes, it can find no means
of access to you, but Caesar will possess your entire being; when
you have left his presence, grief, as though it then had an opportunity
of attack, will lie in ambush for you in your loneliness, and creep
by degrees over your mind as it rests from its labours. {362} You
ought not, therefore, to allow any moment to be unoccupied by
literary pursuits: at such times let literature repay to you the
debt which your long and faithful love has laid upon it, let it
claim you for its high priest and worshipper: at such times let
Homer[1] and Virgil be much in your company, those poets to whom
the human race owes as much as every one owes to you, and they
especially, because you have made them known to a wider circle than
that for which they wrote. All time which you entrust to their
keeping will be safe. At such times, as far as you are able, compile
an account of your Caesar’s acts, that they may be read by all
future ages in a panegyric written by one of his own household: for
he himself will afford you both the noblest subject and the noblest
example for putting together and composing a history. I dare not
go so far as to advise you to write in your usual elegant style a
version of Aesop’s fables, a work which no Roman intellect has
hitherto attempted. It is hard, no doubt, for a mind which has
received so rude a shock to betake itself so quickly to these
livelier pursuits: but if it is able to pass from more serious
studies to these lighter ones, you must regard it as a proof that
it has recovered its strength, and is itself again. In the former
case, although it may suffer and hang back, still it will be led
on by the serious nature of the subject under consideration to take
an interest in it: but, unless it has thoroughly recovered, it will
not endure to treat of subjects which must be written of in a
cheerful spirit. You ought, therefore, first to exercise your mind
upon grave studies, and then to enliven it with gayer ones.
{363}
IX. It will also be a great solace to you if you often ask yourself:
“Am I grieving on my own account or on that of him who is gone? if
on my own, I have no right to boast of my affectionate sensibility;
grief is only excusable as long as it is honourable; but when it
is only caused by personal interests, it no longer springs from
tenderness: nothing can be less becoming to a good man than to make
a calculation about his grief for his brother. If I grieve on his
account, I must necessarily take one of the two following views:
if the dead retain no feeling whatever, my brother has escaped from
all the troubles of life, has been restored to the place which he
occupied before his birth, and, being free from every kind of ill,
can neither fear, nor desire, nor suffer: what madness then for me
never to cease grieving for one who will never grieve again? If the
dead have any feeling, then my brother is now like one who has been
let out of a prison in which he has long been confined, who at last
is free and his own master, and who enjoys himself, amuses himself
with viewing the works of Nature, and looks down from above the
earth upon all human things, while he looks at things divine, whose
meaning he has long sought in vain, from a much nearer standpoint.
Why then am I wasting away with grief for one who is either in bliss
or non-existent? it would be envy to weep for one who is in bliss,
it would be madness to weep for one who has no existence whatever.”
Are you affected by the thought that he appears to have been deprived
of great blessings just at the moment when they came crowding upon
him? after thinking how much he has lost, call to mind how much
more he has ceased to fear: anger will never more wring his heart,
disease will not crush him, suspicion will not disquiet him, the
gnawing pain of envy which we feel at the successes of others will
not attend him, terror will not make him wretched, the fickleness
of fortune who quickly transfers her favours from one man {364} to
another will not alarm him. If you reckon it up properly, he has
been spared more than he has lost. He will not enjoy wealth, or
your influence at Court, or his own: he will not receive benefits,
and will not confer them: do you imagine him to be unhappy, because
he has lost these things, or happy because he does not miss them?
Believe me, he who does not need good fortune is happier than he
on whom it attends: all those good things which charm us by the
attractive but unreal pleasures which they afford, such as money,
high office, influence, and many other things which dazzle the
stupid greed of mankind, require hard labour to keep, are regarded
by others with bitter jealousy, and are more of a menace than an
advantage to those who are bedecked and encumbered by them. They
are slippery and uncertain; one never can enjoy them in comfort;
for, even setting aside anxiety about the future, the present
management of great prosperity is an uneasy task. If we are to
believe some profound seekers after truth, life is all torment: we
are flung, as it were, into this deep and rough sea, whose tides
ebb and flow, at one time raising us aloft by sudden accessions of
fortune, at another bringing down low by still greater losses, and
for ever tossing us about, never letting us rest on firm ground.
We roll and plunge upon the waves, and sometimes strike against one
another, sometimes are shipwrecked, always are in terror. For those
who sail upon this stormy sea, exposed as it is to every gale, there
is no harbour save death. Do not, then, grudge your brother his
rest: he has at last become free, safe, and immortal: he leaves
surviving him Caesar and all his family, yourself, and his and your
brothers. He left Fortune before she had ceased to regard him with
favour, while she stood still by him, offering him gifts with a
full hand. He now ranges free and joyous through the boundless
heavens; he has left this poor and low-lying region, and has soared
{365} upwards to that place, whatever it may be, which receives in
its happy bosom the souls which have been set free from the chains
of matter: he now roams there at liberty, and enjoys with the keenest
delight all the blessings of Nature. You are mistaken! your brother
has not lost the light of day, but has obtained a more enduring
light: whither he has gone, we all alike must go: why then do we
weep for his fate? He has not left us, but has gone on before us.
Believe me, there is great happiness in a happy death. We cannot
be sure of anything even for one whole day: since the truth is so
dark and hard to come at, who can tell whether death came to your
brother out of malice or out of kindness?
X. One who is as just in all things as you are, must find comfort
in the thought that no wrong has been done you by the loss of so
noble a brother, but that you have received a benefit by having
been permitted for so long a time to enjoy his affection. He who
will not allow his benefactor to choose his own way of bestowing a
gift upon him, is unjust: he who does not reckon what he receives
as gain, and yet reckons what he gives back again as loss, is greedy:
he who says that he has been wronged, because his pleasure has come
to an end, is ungrateful: he who thinks that we gain nothing from
good things beyond the present enjoyment of them, is a fool, because
he finds no pleasure in past joys, and does not regard those which
are gone as his most certain possessions, since he need not fear
that they will come to an end. A man limits his pleasures too
narrowly if he believes that he enjoys those things only which he
touches and sees, if he counts the having enjoyed them for nothing:
for all pleasure quickly leaves us, seeing that it flows away, flits
across our lives, and is gone almost before it has come. We ought,
therefore, to make our mind travel back over past time, to bring
back whatever we once took pleasure in, and frequently to ruminate
over it {366} in our thoughts: the remembrance of pleasures is truer
and more trustworthy than their reality. Regard it, then, among
your greatest blessings that you have had an excellent brother: you
need not think for how much longer you might have had him, but for
how long you did have him. Nature gave him to you, as she gives
others to other brothers, not as an absolute property, but as a
loan: afterwards when she thought proper she took him back again,
and followed her own rules of action, instead of waiting until you
had indulged your love to satiety. If any one were to be indignant
at having to repay a loan of money, especially if he had been allowed
to use it without having to pay any interest, would he not be thought
an unreasonable man? Nature gave your brother his life, just as she
gave you yours: exercising her lawful rights, she has chosen to ask
one of you to repay her loan before the other: she cannot be blamed
for this, for you knew the conditions on which you received it: you
must blame the greedy hopes of mortal men’s minds, which every now
and then forget what Nature is, and never remember their own lot
unless reminded of it. Rejoice, then, that you have had so good a
brother, and be grateful for having had the use and enjoyment of
him, though it was for a shorter time than you wished. Reflect that
what you have had of him was most delightful, that your having lost
him is an accident common to mankind. There is nothing more
inconsistent than that a man should grieve that so good a brother
was not long enough with him, and should not rejoice that he
nevertheless has been with him.
XI. “But,” you say, “he was taken away unexpectedly.” Every man is
deceived by his own willingness to believe what he wishes, and he
chooses to forget that those whom he loves are mortal: yet Nature
gives us clear proofs that she will not suspend her laws in favour
of any one: the funeral processions of our friends and of strangers
alike {367} pass daily before our eyes, yet we take no notice of
them, and when an event happens which our whole life warns us will
some day happen, we call it sudden. This is not, therefore, the
injustice of fate, but the perversity and insatiable universal
greediness of the human mind, which is indignant at having to leave
a place to which it was only admitted on sufferance. How far more
righteous was he who, on hearing of the death of his son, made a
speech worthy of a great man, saying: “When I begat him, I knew