B.C. 46, ÆT. 60
- cumbent on me not to be so long silent in what causes you
such deep mourning, but to offer some reasonable consolation such as may suffice to lighten, if it could not wholly heal your sorrow. Now there is a source of consolation—hackneyed indeed to the last degree—which we ought ever to have on our lips and in our hearts: we should remember that we are men, born under the conditions which expose our life to all the missiles of fortune; and we must not decline life on the conditions under which we were born, nor rebel so violently under mischances which we are unable to avoid by any precautions; and by recalling what has happened to others we should reflect that nothing strange has betided us. But neither these, nor other sources of consolation, which have been employed by the greatest philosophers and have been recorded in literature, ought, it seems, to be of so much avail, as the position of the state itself and the disruption of these evil times, which make those the happiest who have never had children, and those who have lost them at such a crisis less miserable than if they had done so when the Republic was in a good state, or indeed had any existence at all. But if your own loss affects you, or if you mourn at the thought of your own position, I do not think that you will find that grief easy to remove in its entirety. If on the other hand what wrings your heart is grief for the miserable fate of those who have fallen—a thought more natural to an affectionate heart—to say nothing of what I have repeatedly read and heard, that there is no evil in death, after which if any sensation remains it is to be regarded as immortality rather than death, while if it is all lost, it follows that nothing must be regarded as misery which is not felt—yet this much I can assert, that confusions are brewing, disasters preparing and threatening the Republic, such that whoever has left them cannot possibly, as it seems to me, be in the wrong. For what place is there now, I don't say for conscience, uprightness, virtue, right feeling, and good qualities, but for bare freedom and safety? By Heaven, I have never been told of any young man or boy having died in this most unhealthy and pestilent year, who did not seem to me to be rescued by the immortal gods from the miseries of this world and from a most intolerable condition of life. Wherefore, if this one idea can be
