HermitshCicero Entire

Letter · March 52 BC · . Romae

Ad Familiares 5.16

Ad Familiares 5.16

Headnote

Cicero to Titius, written from Rome around March 52 BC (the manuscripts: Scr. Romae, ut videtur, circ. m. Mart. a. 702). The recipient — a Titius otherwise unknown, perhaps the senator of that name attested in the early 40s — has lost children, more than one, in what Cicero calls “this most calamitous and pestilent year” (hoc gravissimo et pestilentissimo anno): the early months of 52 BC, in which Clodius had just been killed on the Appian Way, the Senate house had been burnt over his pyre, and Rome was without proper magistrates, sliding toward the sole consulship of Pompey. The plague Cicero glances at is real but secondary; what makes this year “pestilent” in the writing is the political ruin behind the plague. The letter is a letter of consolation in the strict ancient sense — the consolatio as literary form, with its inherited topoi — and it is unusually substantive among Cicero’s surviving examples of the genre, set late in his fifty-fourth year, well before his own great bereavement (the death of Tullia in 45 BC, which would produce the lost Consolatio and shape book 1 of the Tusculans).

The argument moves through the standard philosophical commonplaces, knowingly. The opening topos — we are men, born under this law, our life set up as a target for all the weapons of fortune — is the Stoic-Academic commonplace Cicero will rework into the Latin theoretical literature of his last years (cf. Tusc. 3, the lost Consolatio, De Senectute). The classical disjunction on death — if perception remains, what is in question is immortality, not death; if it does not, no wretchedness can be felt — is the schoolroom argument Cicero will attribute in different forms to Socrates and to Epicurus and rework in his own voice in Tusc. 1. What is distinctive here is the third move, the political one: the standard commonplaces no longer carry their old force, because the times do not let them. The state itself has become a worse evil than death; the children Titius has lost have been spared by the immortal gods from a condition of life worse than the loss. That argument — not in the philosophers — is Cicero’s contribution, and it tells us where he stood in March 52 BC: still able to mobilise the schools, no longer able to believe what their consolation was originally for. The letter closes on the topos of anticipating the medicine of time — doing now, by reason, what duration will do of itself — a figure that points forward to the explicit programme of the Tusculans.

Of all men I am the least fitted to console you, since I have drawn such grief from your troubles that I have need of consolation myself; and yet, since my own pain stands further from the bitterness of supreme mourning than yours does, I have decided that it belongs to our long-standing bond and to my goodwill toward you not to stay silent so long while you are in so great a sorrow, but to offer some moderate consolation, such as might lighten your pain — if it could not heal it.
etsi unus ex omnibus minime sum ad te consolandum accommodatus, quod tantum ex tuis molestiis cepi doloris, ut consolatione ipse egerem, tamen, cum longius a summi luctus acerbitate meus abesset dolor quam tuus, statui nostrae necessitudinis esse meaeque in te benevolentiae non tacere tanto in tuo maerore tam diu, sed adhibere aliquam modicam consolationem, quae levare dolorem tuum posset, si minus sanare potuisset.
There is, in the first place, the most commonplace consolation of all — the one we ought always to have on our lips and in our minds: to remember that we are men, born under this law, that our life is set up as a target for all the weapons of fortune; that we must not refuse to live on the terms on which we were born; and that we should not bear so heavily the blows we cannot escape by any forethought, but, by going over in memory the experiences of others, should consider that nothing new has befallen us.
est autem consolatio pervulgata quidem illa maxime, quam semper in ore atque in animo habere debemus, homines nos ut esse meminerimus ea lege natos, ut omnibus telis fortunae proposita sit vita nostra, neque esse recusandum quo minus ea, qua nati sumus, condicione vivamus, neve tam graviter eos casus feramus, quos nullo consilio vitare possimus, eventisque aliorum memoria repetendis nihil accidisse novi nobis cogitemus.
Neither these nor the other consolations practised by the wisest men and handed down in the records of literature seem capable of doing as much good as the very state of our commonwealth itself, and this present upheaval of times gone to ruin: in which they are happiest who have not raised children, and those who have lost children in these times are less wretched than they would be if they had lost the same children with the commonwealth still sound, or with any commonwealth left at all.
neque hae neque ceterae consolationes, quae sunt a sapientissimis viris usurpatae memoriaeque litteris proditae, tantum videntur proficere debere, quantum status ipse nostrae civitatis et haec ’perturbatio temporum perditorum, cum beatissimi sint qui liberos non susceperunt, minus autem miseri qui his temporibus amiserunt quam si eosdem bona aut denique aliqua re p. perdidissent.
If it is your own loss that moves you, or if you grieve from thinking of your own affairs, I do not think this whole pain of yours can easily be drawn off. But if what tortures you is rather the thing that belongs to love — that you mourn the misery of those who have fallen — then, not to repeat what I have most often read and heard, that there is no evil in death (from which, if perception remains, what should rather be reckoned is immortality and not death; and if perception has been lost, no wretchedness can seem to exist which is not felt) — still I can affirm without hesitation that things are being mixed, prepared, hanging over the commonwealth such that whoever has left them behind seems to me in no way to have been cheated. For what room is there now, I do not say for modesty, uprightness, virtue, the right pursuits, the good arts, but for liberty and bare safety at all? By Hercules, I have not heard, in this most calamitous and pestilent year, of any youth or boy dead who did not seem to me to have been snatched away by the immortal gods from these miseries and from this most unjust condition of life.
quod si tuum te desiderium movet, aut si tuarum rerum cogitatione maeres, non facile exhauriri tibi istum dolorem posse universum puto; sin illa te res cruciat, quae magis amoris est, ut eorum, qui occiderunt, miserias lugeas, ut ea non dicam, quae saepissime et legi et audivi, nihil mali esse in morte, ex qua si resideat sensus, immortalitas illa potius quam mors ducenda sit, sin sit amissus, nulla videri miseria debeat quae non sentiatur, hoc tamen non dubitans confirmare possum, ea misceri, parari, impendere rei p., quae qui reliquerit nullo modo mihi quidem deceptus esse videatur. quid est enim iam non modo pudori, probitati, virtuti, rectis studiis, bonis artibus, sed omnino libertati ac saluti loci? non me hercule quemquam audivi hoc gravissimo et pestilentissimo anno adulescentulum aut puerum mortuum, qui mihi non a dis immortalibus ereptus ex his miseriis atque ex iniquissima condicione vitae videretur.
Therefore, if this one thing can be subtracted from your view — that any evil has befallen those whom you have loved — a great deal will be taken from your sorrow. There will remain only that single concern for your own pain, which will not be shared with them but referred properly to yourself; in which it is not consistent with your gravity and wisdom — qualities you have shown from boyhood — to bear too intemperately the blow of your own misfortunes, when that blow is set apart from the wretchedness and harm of those you have loved. You have always conducted yourself in private and in public so that gravity must be guarded, and constancy served. For what mere length of time will bring of itself — which by its sheer duration removes the greatest griefs — this we ought to anticipate by deliberation and prudence.
qua re, si tibi unum hoc detrahi potest, ne quid iis, quos amasti, mali putes contigisse, permultum erit ex maerore tuo deminutum. relinquetur enim simplex illa iam cura doloris tui, quae non cum illis communicabitur sed ad te ipsum proprie referetur; in qua non est iam gravitatis et sapientiae tuae, quam tu a puero praestitisti, ferre immoderatius casum incommodorum tuorum, qui sit ab eorum, quos dilexeris, miseria maloque seiunctus. etenim eum semper te et privatis in rebus et publicis praestitisti, tuenda tibi ut sit gravitas et constantiae serviendum. nam, quod adlatura est ipsa diuturnitas, quae maximos luctus vetustate tollit, id nos praecipere consilio prudentiaque debemus.
For if no woman has ever been of so weak a spirit, on the loss of children, that she did not at last set some limit to her mourning, then surely we ought, by counsel, to anticipate what the day will bring, and not wait for the medicine of time — which we can supply at once, by reason. If by this letter I shall have accomplished anything, I shall consider that I have attained something worth wishing for; if it has not perhaps had the strength to do that, I shall at least have discharged the office of one most goodwilled toward you, and most affectionate as a friend. Such a friend I would have you believe I have always been to you, and feel confident that I shall remain.
etenim, si nulla fuit umquam liberis amissis tam imbecillo mulier.animo quae non aliquando lugendi modum fecerit, certe nos, quod est dies adlatura, id consilio anteferre debemus neque exspectare temporis medicinam, quam repraesentare ratione possimus. his ego litteris si quid profecissem, existimabam optandum quiddam me esse adsecutum; sin minus forte valuissent, officio tamen esse functum viri benevolentissimi atque amicissimi. quem me tibi et fuisse semper existimes velim et futurum esse confidas.

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Ad Familiares 5.16

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