It will also serve as a great relief, if you will often question yourself thus: “Am I grieving on my own account, or on account of him who has departed? If on my own account, this parade of affection is idle, and my grief, the only excuse for which is that it is honorable, begins to show defection from brotherly love when it looks toward personal advantage; but nothing is less becoming to a good man than to be calculating in his grief for a brother. If I grieve on his account, I must decide that one or the other of the two following views is true. For, if the dead retain no feeling whatever, my brother has escaped from all the ills of life, and has been restored to that state in which he had been before he was born, and, exempt from every ill, he fears nothing, desires nothing, suffers nothing. What madness this is — that I should never cease to grieve for one who will never grieve any more! If, however, the dead do retain some feeling, at this moment my brother’s soul, released, as it were, from its long imprisonment, exults to be at last its own lord and master, enjoys the spectacle of Nature, and from its higher place looks down upon all human things, while upon things divine,10 the explanation of which it had so long sought in vain, it gazes with a nearer vision. And so why should I pine away in yearning for him who either is happy or does not exist? But to weep for one who is happy is envy; for one who does not exist, madness.”
Or is it this that moves you — the thought that he has been deprived of great blessings just when they were showered upon him? But when you reflect that there are many things that he has lost, reflect also that there are more that he no longer fears. He is not racked by anger, he is not smitten with disease, he is not worried by suspicion, he is not assailed by gnawing envy that is always hostile to other men’s successes, he is not disquieted by fear, he is not alarmed by the fickleness of Fortune, who quickly shifts her favors. If you count carefully, he has been spared more than he has lost. He will not enjoy wealth, nor favor at court, his own together with yours; he will not receive benefits, he will not bestow them. Do you think that he is unhappy because he has lost these things, or happy because be does not miss them? Believe me, he is happier who does not need good fortune than he for whom it is in store. All those goods that delight us by their showy, but deceptive, charm — money, standing, power, and the many other things at the sight of which the human race, in its blind greed, is filled with awe — bring trouble to their possessor, stir jealousy in the beholder, and in the end also crush the very men that they adorn; they are more of a menace than a good. They are slippery and uncertain, and are never held happily; for though there should be no anxiety about the future, yet the mere preservation of great prosperity is full of worry. If we are to believe some who have a more profound insight into truth, all life is a torment. Plunged into this deep and restless sea, that ebbs and flows with changing tides, now uplifting us with sudden accessions of fortune, now sweeping us downward with greater losses and flinging us about incessantly, we never stay steadfast in one place, we dangle aloft, are tossed hither and thither, collide with each other, and sometimes suffer shipwreck, always fear it; for those who sail upon this sea, so stormy and exposed to every gale, there is no harbor save death. And so do not grudge your brother this — he is at rest. At last he is free, at last safe, at last immortal. He leaves Caesar and all of Caesar’s offspring still surviving, he leaves you surviving in company with the brothers of you both. While Fortune was still standing near him and bestowing her gifts with generous hand, he left her before she could make any change in her favor. He delights now in the open and boundless sky, from a low and sunken region he has darted aloft to that place (whatever it be) which receives in its happy embrace souls that are freed from their chains; and he now roams there, and explores with supreme delight all the blessings of Nature. You are mistaken — your brother has not lost the light of day, but he has gained a purer light. The way thither is the same for us all. Why do we bemoan his fate? He has not left us, but has gone before. Believe me, there is great happiness in the very necessity of dying. We can be sure of nothing — not even for the whole of one day. Where the truth is so dark and involved, who can divine whether Death had a grudge against your brother or sought his welfare?