Seneca’s three consolations

What a consolation is

In Greek and Roman writing, a consolation was a recognized form: a letter or treatise written to someone after a bereavement, an exile or some other blow, meant both to comfort and to persuade. Seneca knew the tradition. Writing to his mother, he says he had read through the works the greatest writers had composed to soothe grief (Consolation to Helvia 1). Three consolations of his survive, among the twelve books of short prose works known as his Dialogues (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

To Marcia is probably the earliest of Seneca’s works to survive. The other two come from his exile: in 41 CE the emperor Claudius banished him to Corsica on a charge of adultery with Julia Livilla, the sister of the previous emperor, Gaius (Caligula), and he stayed there until 49 (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). They may date to about 43 or 44. Quotations here are from Aubrey Stewart’s 1889 translation, with his chapter numbers.

To Marcia

Marcia was the daughter of the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus. Hounded by the agents of Sejanus, the emperor Tiberius’s powerful minister, Cordus starved himself to death, and much of his history was burned. When the times allowed it, Marcia published his books again (Consolation to Marcia 1, 22). Seneca opens by praising her for that, then turns to her son Metilius, dead three years.

He means it. In his view the grief is now kept up “more from habit than from sorrow,” and the letter that follows is an argument, not a condolence card.

Two mothers (chapters 2–5). Seneca sets two women of Augustus’s family side by side. Octavia, the emperor’s sister, mourned her son Marcellus for the rest of her life. She would have no portrait of him and let no one mention him. Livia, the emperor’s wife, lost her son Drusus on campaign in Germany and chose differently.

Seneca then reports what the philosopher Areus told Livia in her first grief: her friends did not know whether to speak of her son, so let them, and stop looking only at the last scene of his life (4–5). It is the most humane advice in the letter. People who grieve are often protected from the name they most want to hear.

The arguments (chapters 6–18). Tears do not change what has happened (6). Nature asks for some grief, and public opinion demands more (7), a passage read closely on our grief guide. Time wears down even an obstinate grief, and it would be better to set it down yourself than to wait for that (8). Funerals pass our houses, yet we never think of death, so loss takes us by surprise (9), a chapter read on our page about premeditatio malorum. Everything we have is borrowed for a time (10), and a human being is about as sturdy as a clay pot (11). Seneca asks Marcia to be grateful for the years she had with her son (12), then lists famous Romans, from Sulla to the emperor Tiberius, who bore the deaths of their children (12–15). He expects her objection that his examples are all men:

He points out what she still has: two daughters, and the two granddaughters her son left her (16). Then comes a traveler to Syracuse, told every sight and every danger before he sails, who has only himself to blame for what he meets there. Nature, Seneca says, sets out the terms of having children, and of being born at all, just as plainly (17–18).

Death, and the son himself (chapters 19–26). The last third turns to death. The dead suffer no evils (19), a chapter collected among Stoic quotes on death. Death frees the enslaved and makes everyone equal (20). Measured against all of time, no life is long (21). A longer one might have brought her son worse things, and here Seneca tells the story of Cordus’s death at length (22). Then he asks Marcia to reckon her son’s age by his virtues, not his years (24), pictures his soul rising to join the souls of the blessed (25), and ends with a speech in the voice of Cordus himself, looking down on a world that will one day burn and begin again (26).

To Helvia

Seneca’s mother had already buried a great deal before he was exiled. She lost her own mother at birth, then an uncle and, within a month, her husband, and later three grandchildren. Less than twenty days before the news of his exile reached her, Seneca’s own child died in her arms (Consolation to Helvia 2). Now she was mourning a son who was still alive, and Seneca says that is what made his letter new: he could find no earlier writer who had consoled his family while they grieved for him (1).

He sets himself two tasks: to show that he is not miserable, and that her loss, which comes to her through him, is bearable (4).

Exile is a change of place (chapters 5–9). Seneca never trusted Fortune and kept her gifts at a distance, so she took them back without tearing them away (5). Most of the crowds in Rome left their home towns to come there, and even on Corsica, a barren rock, there are more strangers than natives (6). Whole peoples have migrated (7). And two things go wherever we go:

A few lines later he looks up. As long as he can watch the sun, the moon and the stars, he asks, what does it matter what ground he stands on? Chapter 9 adds the example of Marcellus, whom Brutus found living contentedly in exile at Mytilene, never more devoted to literature.

Poverty and disgrace (chapters 10–13). The body needs very little: shelter from the cold and enough to eat and drink (10–11). Seneca mocks rich men who set aside days to eat off earthenware and play at being poor (12), an idea taken up in our guide to voluntary discomfort. And no one is despised by others who has not first despised himself (13).

Her grief (chapters 14–20). Helvia does not miss her son’s influence, Seneca says; she never used it (14). She misses him: his company, his conversation, the studies they shared (15). Chapter 16, hard going for many modern readers, tells her that being a woman is no excuse for endless tears; its point rests on an old Roman custom that gave widows ten months of mourning, not forbidding grief but limiting it. Seneca then urges her toward philosophy rather than distraction, and wishes his father had let her study it properly (17). He points her to the family she still has: his two brothers, a young grandson named Marcus, a granddaughter to bring up, her own father, and her sister, whose husband died at sea and who, though shipwrecked herself, kept hold of his body so that she could bury him (18–19). The last chapter tells her how to think of him.

“I am as joyous and cheerful as in my best days” may be a brave face for a worried mother. It is also the whole letter in one line: the mind is the one possession exile cannot touch.

To Polybius

Polybius was a powerful freedman in the household of the emperor Claudius (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). Seneca describes him handling the petitions that reached the emperor from all over the world (Consolation to Polybius 6) and praises his writing, including his work making Homer and Virgil known to new readers (8). His brother had died young. The opening of the letter is lost, and the surviving text begins mid-sentence.

Everything ends (chapters 1–4). Everything that has a beginning has an end, Seneca says, and it is a consolation that what has happened to us has happened to everyone before us (1). Then he joins Polybius in railing against Fortune for taking such a brother (2–3), before admitting that no tears or reproaches will move fate (4).

Reasons to hold back (chapters 5–9). His brother would not want to be a source of agony to him (5). Polybius is watched, and a man in his place cannot grieve in private (6). He should remember all he owes to Caesar (7). Grief waits for him at home after the day’s work, so he should fill those hours with study and writing (8). And he should ask himself whether he grieves on his own account or on his brother’s (9).

Gratitude (chapter 10). This is the letter’s best page.

The question is “for how long you did have him,” not how much longer you might have, and a loan returned is no wrong done to you. Epictetus, teaching about half a century later, makes a similar move in Enchiridion 11: say you have given something back, never that you have lost it. Our guide to negative visualization reads that chapter. The next chapter, on why we call such deaths sudden (11), is among our quotes on death.

Claudius (chapters 12–17). The emperor has been in the background since chapter 7, where Seneca reminds Polybius how much he owes him. Now he takes over. Seneca tells Polybius to fix his eyes on Caesar whenever tears rise (12), and turns to his own case:

Claudius, he says, “not only gave me my life but even begged it for me,” and his mercy is bringing other exiles home. Chapters 14–16 imagine the emperor consoling Polybius with famous Romans, many from his own family, who lost brothers and bore it. Chapter 17 sets against them Gaius, who after his sister Drusilla’s death stayed away from her funeral and passed the time playing dice.

The appeal did not work. Seneca stayed on Corsica until 49, and after Claudius died in 54, the Apocolocyntosis, a satire on the emperor’s deification attributed to Seneca, mocked him (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). It is hard to read chapters 12–17 without remembering that. Chapter 18, where Seneca says he will never forbid mourning, is read on our grief guide. He closes with an apology: long exile has dulled his mind, and he hears nothing around him but a foreign language.

Reading them today

If you are grieving now, start with our guide to grief, which reads the gentlest of these passages slowly. Read whole, the consolations are harder.

Some of it has not aged well. Seneca writes from Roman assumptions about women and rank, and womanish turns up as an insult. His method can be rough: he will do battle with Marcia’s grief, and with his mother he will use the surgeon’s knife rather than soothing words (Helvia 2). To a mother, he argues that an early death may have spared her son worse (Marcia 22). On what happens after death he does not settle on one view: he tells Marcia that death is nothing (Marcia 19) and later that her son’s soul has risen to join the blessed (Marcia 25), and he offers Polybius both possibilities side by side (Polybius 9). And there is the flattery of Claudius.

Much of it holds up. Seneca writes about particular people, not types: Livia setting up portraits of her son, Helvia’s sister carrying her husband’s body out of a wreck, Polybius’s brother remembered for keeping his word (Polybius 18). His distinctions are still useful, between the grief nature asks of us and the grief we add, and between mourning for the dead and mourning for ourselves. And his advice keeps returning to memory: say the name, tell the stories, and let remembering become a pleasure.

For a first reading, take To Helvia. It is the most personal of the three, and since its subject is exile rather than death, it reads as Seneca’s account of what a person keeps when nearly everything else has been taken. Then read To Marcia, the fullest. Leave To Polybius for last, and read it knowing where it was written and why. For Seneca’s other works, start with our page on Seneca or his short book on time, On the Shortness of Life.