“But,” you say, “he was snatched from me unexpectedly.” Every man is deceived by his own credulity, and in the case of those whom he loves he willfully forgets mortality. Yet Nature has made it clear that she will exempt no man from her stern law. Every day the funerals of acquaintances and strangers pass by before our eyes, we, nevertheless, pay no heed, and we count that event as sudden of whose coming the whole of life has given us warning. This, therefore, is not the injustice of Fate, but the perversity of the human mind that, with its insatiable greed for all things, chafes at leaving a place to which it was admitted on sufferance. How much more righteous was he who, on the announcement of the death of his son, uttered the words, worthy of a great man: “When I begat him, I knew then that he would die.”12 We need not be at all surprised that the son of such a man was one who was able to die bravely. He did not receive the news of the death of his son as a strange thing; for why is it surprising that man should die when his whole life is nothing but a journey toward death? “When I begat him, I knew then that he would die,” he said. And then he added some words that show even greater wisdom and courage: “And it was for this that I reared him.” It is for this that we all are reared; every man who is brought into life is appointed to die. Let us rejoice, therefore, in whatever shall be given us, and let us return it when we are asked for it. The Fates will seize one at one time, another at another; they will pass no man by. Let the mind, then, stand in readiness, and let it never fear whatever must be, let it always expect whatever may be.
Why need I tell you of generals and the offspring of generals, of men famous for their many consulships or many triumphs, who have finished their appointed lot? Whole kingdoms with their kings and peoples with their rulers have met their fate; all men, nay, all things, look toward their last day. They do not all have the same end; life forsakes one in the middle of his career, it leaves another at the very entrance, and another it reluctantly releases in extreme old age when he is now worn out and eager to depart; one goes at one time, another at another, yet we are all traveling toward the same place. I know not whether it is more foolish to be ignorant of the law of mortality, or more presumptuous to refuse to obey it.
Turn, now, to those poems which the efforts of our genius have made famous and which you have turned into prose with such skill that, though their form has disappeared, they, nevertheless, retain all their charm (for you have so performed the most difficult task of transferring them from one language to another that all their merits have followed them into the foreign speech) — take into your hands whichever of the two authors you please, and you will find that there is not a single book of their writings which does not supply numberless examples of the vicissitudes of human life, of unexpected misfortunes, and of tears that for one reason or another have been made to flow. Read with what great vigor you have thundered in mighty words; suddenly to break down and fall short of such grandeur of utterance will make you blush. Let it not happen that every one who admired your writings as a model should wonder how a spirit so easily broken produced such mighty and substantial works.