W ith many sorrows of this kind has Fortune afflicted me all my life long. For, not to mention my other calamities, I have lost five children under the most distressing circumstances possible to myself. For I lost all five separately, in every case an only child, suffering this series of bereavements in such a way that I never had a child born to me except while bereaved of another. So I always lost children without any left to console me and with my grief fresh upon me I begat others.
I have suffered from constant and serious ill-health, my dearest Marcus. Then afflicted by the most distressing calamities I have further lost my wife, I have lost my grandson in Germany—woe is me!—I have lost my Decimanus.11 If I were of iron I could write no more just now.
I have sent you a book which you can take as representing all my thoughts.
Fronto to Lucius Verus
165 A.D.
To my Lord Verus Augustus.
But I bore with more fortitude those woes by which I myself alone was racked. For my mind, struggling with my own grief, matched as in a single combat man to man, equal with equal, made a stout resistance. But no longer do I withstand a single or solitary opponent, for grief upon bitter grief is multiplied and I can no longer bear the consummation of my woes, but as my Victorinus weeps, I waste away, I melt away along with him. Often I even find fault with the immortal Gods and upbraid the Fates with reproaches.1
Victorinus, a man of entire affection, gentleness, sincerity, and blamelessness,2 a man, further, conspicuous for the noblest accomplishments to be thus afflicted by his son's most untimely death, was this in any sense just or fair? If Providence does govern the world, was this too rightly provided? If all human things are determined by Destiny, ought this to have been determined by Destiny? Shall there, then, be no distinction of fortunes between the good and the bad? Have the Gods, have the Destinies no power of discrimination as to what sort of man shall be robbed of his son? Some thoroughly vicious and abandoned wretch, who had far better himself never been born, rears his children safely and leaves them at his death to survive him.3 Victorinus, a blameless man, is bereaved of his darling son, and yet it would have been in the highest interests of the state that as many as possible of his kind should be born. Why Providence—out upon it!—if it provides unfairly? The Destinies, they say, are called so from the word "to destine": is this to destine rightly? Now the poets assign to the Destinies distaris and threads. Surely no spinner would be so perverse and unskilful as to spin for her master's toga a heavy and knotty yarn, but for a slave's dress a fine and delicate one. For good men to be stricken with sorrow while the bad enjoy every domestic felicity—such a spinning performance by the Destinies I hold to be neither by weight nor rate.4
Unless maybe quite another error throws us out, and through ignorance of the facts we are coveting what is evil, as though it were to our advantage, and, on the other hand, turning away from what is good, as though it were to our harm,5 whereas death itself, which seems grievous to all, brings rest from toil and care and trouble, and freeing us from these most wretched fetters of the Lody transports us to those serine and delightful assemblies of souls where all joys are to be found. I would more readily believe that this is so than that all human things are governed either by no Providence or by one that acts unfairly.6
But it death be rather a matter for welcome than for mourning, the younger each one attains to it the happier must he be accounted and the greater favourite of the Gods,7 released as he will have been the sooner from the ills of the body, and the sooner called forth to inherit the privileges of an enfranchised soul. Yet all this, true though it be, makes little difference to us who long for our lost ones, nor does the immortality of souls bring us the slightest consolation, seeing that in this life we are bereft of our best-beloved ones. We miss the well-known gait, the voice, the features, the free air; we mourn over the pitiable face of the dead, the lips sealed, the eyes turned, the hue of life all fled. Be the immortality of the soul ever so established, that will be a theme for the disputations of philosophers, it will never assuage the yearning of a parent.
But however these things have been ordained from heaven, to rne indeed, for whom death is so near, they can by no means bring any lasting perplexity. Whether we are annihilated for ever, as . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I once desired, at last I was unable for grief and tears. Now it is even my darling grandson, whom I am bringing up myself in my own bosom, it is he, indeed, who more and more rends and racks my heart. For in his lineaments I behold the other whom I have lost, I seem to see a copy of his face and fancy that I hear the very echo of his voice. This is the picture that my grief conjures up of itself. But not knowing the dead child's face I fret myself away with imagining what he was like.
My daughter will be reasonable, she will rest upon her husband's love, and he is the best of men. He will comfort her by mingling his tears and sighs with hers, by speaking when she speaks and being silent when she is silent. It will scarce befit me, her aged father, to comfort her; for it were more fitting had I myself been the first to die. Nor would any poet's songs or philosopher's precepts avail so much to assuage my daughter's grief and soothe her pain as her husband's voice issuing from lips so dear and a heart so near her own.
My comfort, however, I find in my life being almost spent and death very near. When it comes, be its advent by night or by day, yet will I hail the heavens as I depart and wiat my conscience tells me I will testify,8 that in my long span of life I have been guilty of nothing dishonourable, shameful, or criminal; my whole life through there has not been on my side a single act of avarice or of treachery, but on the contrary many of generosity, many of friendship, many of good faith, many of loyalty, undertaken, too, often at the risk of my life. With the best of brothers I have lived in the utmost harmony, and I rejoice to see him raised by your father's kindness to the highest offices and resting in the friendship of both of you in all peace and security. The honours which I myself have attained9 I never coveted to gain by unworthy means. I have devoted myself to the cultivation of my mind rather than my body. I have held the pursuit of learning higher than the acquisition of wealth. I preferred to be poor10 rather than indebted to another's help, at the worst to be in want rather than to beg.
In expenditure I have never been extravagant, sometimes earned only enough to live upon. I have spoken the truth studiously, I have heard the truth gladly. I have held it better to be forgotten than to fawn, to be silent than insincere, to be a negligent friend than a diligent flatterer. It is little I have sought, not a little I have deserved. According to my means I have obliged every man. The deserving have found in me a readier, the undeserving a more quixotic, helper. Nor if I found anyone ungrateful, did that make me less willing to bestow upon him betimes all the services in my power; nor have I ever been vexed by the ungrateful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .