Nor shall I direct your mind to precepts of the sterner sort,9 so as to bid you bear a human fortune in inhuman fashion, so as to dry a mother’s eyes on the very day of burial. But I shall come with you before an arbiter, and this will be the question at issue between us — whether grief ought to be deep or neverending. I doubt not that the example of Julia Augusta,10 whom you regarded as an intimate friend, will seem more to your taste than the other; she summons you to follow her. She, during the first passion of grief, when its victims are most unsubmissive and most violent, made herself accessible to the philosopher Areus, the friend of her husband, and later confessed that she had gained much help from that source — more than from the Roman people, whom she was unwilling to sadden with this sadness of hers; more than from Augustus, who was staggering under the loss of one of his main supports, and was in no condition to be further bowed down by the grief of his dear ones; more than from her son Tiberius, whose devotion at that untimely funeral that made the nations weep kept her from feeling that she had suffered any loss except in the number of her sons. It was thus, I fancy, that Areus approached her, it was thus he commenced to address a woman who clung most tenaciously to her own opinion: “Up to this day, Julia, at least so far as I am aware — and, as the constant companion of your husband, I have known not only everything that was given forth to the public, but all the more secret thoughts of your minds — you have taken pains that no one should find anything at all in you to criticize; and not only in the larger matters, but in the smallest trifles, you have been on your guard not to do anything that you could wish public opinion, that most frank judge of princes, to excuse. And nothing, I think, is more admirable than the rule that those who have been placed in high position should bestow pardon for many things, should seek pardon for none. And so in this matter also you must still hold to your practice of doing nothing that you could wish undone, or done otherwise.