In consolation to his wife

FROM PLUTARCH TO HIS WIFE. I hope this finds you well. The man you sent to give me the news of our child's death seems to have missed me during his overland journey to Athens, but I heard about it from my granddaughter when I got to Tanagra. I imagine that the burial rites are over by now, and I hope they were conducted in a way that makes the chance of your feeling distress at the burial both now and in the future as remote as possible. But if there is something you haven't yet done, even though you want to, because you are waiting to hear what I intend to do, and it is something which you think would make things easier to bear, then it will happen too, with no fuss and superstitious nonsense - not that you are at all liable to these faults.

All I ask, my dear, is that while reacting emotionally you make sure that both of us - me as well as you - remain in a stable state. I mean, the actual event is a known quantity and I can keep it within limits, but if I find your distress excessive, this will discompose me more than what has happened. Nevertheless, I was not born 'from oak or rock', as you yourself know, given that you have been my partner in bringing up so many children - all brought up with no one else's help in our own home - and I know how overjoyed you were with the birth, after four sons, of the daughter you longed for and with the fact that it gave me the opportunity to name her after you. In addition, one's love for children of that age is peculiarly acute, since the pleasure it affords is absolutely unsullied and untainted by any element of anger and criticism. Also, she was inherently wonderfully easy to please and undemanding, and the way she repaid affection with affection and was so charming was not only delightful, but also made one realize how unselfish she was. She used to encourage her wet-nurse to offer and present her breast not only to other babies, but also to her favourite playthings and toys: she was unselfishly trying to share the good things she had and the things she most enjoyed with her favourites, as if they were guests at her very own table.

However, my dear, I fail to see any reason why, when this and similar behaviour pleased us during her life, it should upset and trouble us when we recall it now. I worry about the alternative, however - that we might consign the memory of her to oblivion along with our distress. This would be to act like Clymene, who said, 'I hate the curved cornel bow! I wish there were no gymnasia!': she was always nervous about recalling her son, and avoided doing so, because distress was its companion, and it is natural to avoid anything painful. No, our daughter was the sweetest thing in the world to hug and watch and listen to, and by the same token she must remain and live on in our thoughts, and bring not just more, but a great deal more pleasure than distress - if it is plausible to expect that the arguments we have often deployed on others will help us in our hour of need - and we must not slump in dejection or shut ourselves away and so pay for those pleasures with distress that vastly outweighs it.

People who were with you also tell me, with some surprise, that you haven't adopted mourning clothes, that you didn't make yourself or your maids follow any ugly or harrowing practices and that the paraphernalia of an expensive celebration was absent from the funeral - that instead everything was conducted with discretion and in silence, and with only the essential accoutrements. It was no surprise to me, however, that you who never tricked yourself out for the theatre or a public procession, and never saw any point in extravagance even where your pleasures were concerned, maintained unaffectedness and frugality in sad circumstances.

The point is that Bacchic rites are not the only circumstances which require a decent woman to remain uncorrupted: she should equally assume that the instability and emotional disturbance which grief entails call for self-control, which is not, as is popularly supposed, the enemy of affection and love, but of mental indulgence. Affection is what we gratify by missing, valuing and remembering the dead, but the insatiable desire for grief - a desire which makes us wail and howl - is just as contemptible as hedonistic indulgence, despite the notion that it is forgivable because, although it may be contemptible, it is accompanied not by any pleasure gained from the desire, but rather by distress and pain. Could there be anything more absurd than banishing excesses of laughter and mirth, and yet allowing the floodgates of tears and lamentation, which spring from the same source as merriment, to open to their fullest extent? Or - as some husbands do - quarrelling with their wives about extravagant hair perfume and gaudy clothing, and yet submitting when they cut off their hair in mourning, dye their clothes black and adopt ugly postures when sitting and uncomfortable ones when reclining at table? Or - and this is the most irritating of all - resisting and restraining their wives if they punish their servants of either sex excessively and unfairly, and yet ignoring the vicious, harsh punishments they inflict upon themselves when they are under the influence of emotion and misfortunes which actually call for a relaxed and charitable attitude?

Our relationship, however, my dear, is such that there never has been any occasion for us to quarrel on the one score, and there never will be any occasion for us to quarrel on the other, I am sure. On the one hand, every philosopher who has spent time with us and got to know us has been impressed with the inextravagance of your clothing and make-up, and with the modesty of your lifestyle, and every one of our fellow citizens has witnessed your unaffectedness during rituals and sacrifices and at the theatre. On the other hand, you have already demonstrated in the past that you can remain stable under these circumstances, when you lost your eldest child and again when our lovely Charon left us before his time. I remember that I brought visitors with me on my journey from the coast at the news of the child's death, and that they and everyone else gathered in our house. As they subsequently told others as well, when they saw how calm and peaceful it was, they thought that nothing terrible had happened and that a baseless rumour had got out, because you had behaved so responsibly in arranging the house at a time when disarray is normally excusable, despite the fact that you had nursed him at your own breast and had endured an operation when your nipple got inflamed, which are noble acts stemming from motherly love.

It is noticeable that most mothers take their children into their arms as if they were playthings (after others have cleaned them and smartened them up), and then, if the children die, these mothers wallow in empty, indecent grief. They are not motivated by warmth of feeling, which is a reasonable and commendable emotion: their strong inclination towards shallow beliefs, plus a dash of instinctive emotion, causes outbursts of grief which are fierce, manic and unruly. Aesop was apparently aware of this: he said that when Zeus was distributing recognition among the gods, Grief asked for some as well; so Zeus allowed Grief to be acknowledged - but only by people who deliberately wanted to acknowledge it.

This is certainly what happens at the beginning: only an individual lets grief enter himself; but after a while it becomes a permanent sibling, a habitual presence, and then it doesn't leave however much one wants it to. That is why it is crucial to resist it on the threshold and not to adopt special clothing or haircuts or anything else like that, which allow it to establish a stronghold. These things challenge the mind day in and day out, make it recoil, belittle it and constrict it and imprison it, and make it unresponsive and apprehensive, as if the wearing of these clothes and the adoption of these practices out of grief cut it off from laughter and light and the sociability of the table. The consequences of this affliction are physical neglect and an aversion to oiling and bathing the body and to other aspects of the daily regimen, when exactly the opposite should happen: purely mental suffering ought to be helped by physical fitness. Mental distress abates and subsides to a great extent when it is dispersed in physical calm, as waves subside in fair weather, but if as a result of a bad regimen the body becomes sordid and foul and transmits to the mind nothing benign or beneficial, but only the harsh and unpleasant fumes of pain and distress, then even those who desire it find that recovery becomes hard to achieve. These are the kinds of disorders that take possession of the mind when it is treated so badly.

Nevertheless, I have no cause to worry about the worst and most worrying disorder which occurs in such cases - 'the invasion of malignant women', with the cries and expressions of sympathy which they use to polish and hone distress, and to prevent its being diminished either by external factors or of its own accord. For I know about the battles you recently had when you went to assist Theon's sister and defended her against the incursions of the women who came with their weeping and wailing - behaviour which is exactly the same as fighting fire with fire. I mean, when people see a friend's house on fire, then everyone contributes what he can to put it out as quickly as possible; but when that same friend's mind is on fire, they bring fuel! And although when someone has an eye infection, people don't let just anyone touch it or treat the inflammation, people who are grieving sit and let everyone who comes by prod at their running sore, so to speak, and aggravate the condition, until instead of being an insignificant itching irritation, it erupts into a seriously disagreeable affliction. Anyway, I know that you will be on your guard against this.

Please try, however, to use your mind as a vehicle for often returning to the time when this child of ours had not yet been born and we had no reason to blame fortune; and then connect that time with the present, and imagine that our circumstances are no different again. You see, my dear, we will seem to regret that our child was ever born if we find more to complain about now than in the situation before her birth. We must not erase the intervening two years from our memories, but since they brought happiness and joy, we must count them as pleasant. The good was brief, but should not therefore be regarded as a long-term bad influence; and we should not be ungrateful for what we received just because our further hopes were dashed by fortune.

The point is that a reverential attitude towards the gods and being charitable and uncomplaining with regard to fortune always yield a dividend which is both fine and enjoyable, and anyone who, in a situation like ours, makes a particular point of highlighting the memory of good things and turning his mind away from the dark and disturbing aspects of his life towards the bright and brilliant ones instead either completely extinguishes whatever it is that is causing him pain, or at least decreases and obscures it by blending it with its opposite. Perfume is always nice to smell, but it is also an antidote to unpleasant odours; likewise, bearing good things in mind serves the extra purpose of essential support, in times of trouble, for people who are not afraid to recall good times and do not critically hold fortune entirely responsible for every bad thing that happens. And that is a condition we should avoid - the syndrome of whingeing if the book of our life has a single smudge while every other page is perfectly clean. I mean, you have often been told that happiness is a consequence of correctly using the rational mind for the goal of a stable state, and that if it is a chance event which causes one to deviate, this does not constitute a major reversal and does not mean that the edifice of one's life has collapsed and been demolished.

Suppose that we too were to follow the usual practice of being guided by external circumstances, of keeping a tally of events due to fortune and of relying on any casual assessment of whether or not we are happy: even so, you should not take into consideration the current weeping and wailing of your visitors, which is trotted out on each and every occasion, prompted by pointless social customs. You would be better off bearing in mind that they continue to envy you for your children, your home and your way of life. As long as there are others who would gladly choose your fate, even including our present upset, it is awful for you, as the bearer of the fate, to complain and grumble, instead of letting the very source of your pain bring you to the realization of how much we have to be grateful for in what we still have. Otherwise, you will resemble those people who pick out Homer's headless and tapering lines, and ignore the many extensive passages of outstanding composition: if you do this, and nitpickingly whinge about the bad features of your life, and gloss over the good points in a vague and sweeping fashion, you will be behaving like those mean and avaricious people who build up a considerable hoard and don't make use of what they get, but still moan and grumble when they lose it.

If you feel sorry about our daughter dying before she was able to marry and have children, then again you can find other reasons for cheering yourself up, in that you have known and experienced both these states: I mean, they cannot simultaneously be significant and insignificant blessings, depending on whether or not one has been deprived of them! And the fact that she has gone to a place of no pain ought not to be a source of pain to us. Why should she cause us to suffer, if there is nothing that can now cause her pain? Even huge losses cease to be a source of distress when the point is reached at which the objects are no longer missed, and your Timoxena suffered only minor losses, since what she was familiar with and what she found pleasure in were not things of great importance. And as for things she was unaware of, which had never entered her mind or caught her fancy - how could she be said to have lost them?

Then there is that other idea you've come across, which is commonly accepted, that it is quite impossible for anything to harm or distress something which has been dissolved. But I know that both the doctrine we've inherited from our ancestors and the maxims of the Dionysian Mysteries (which those of us who are in the group are privy to) prevent you believing this idea. So, since the soul cannot be destroyed, you can compare what happens to it to the behaviour of caged birds: if it has made a physical body its home for an extended period of time, and has allowed a plethora of material events and long familiarity to domesticate it to this way of life, then it resumes its perch inside a body and doesn't let go or stop its involvement, through rebirth after rebirth, with worldly conditions and fortunes. If old age is the butt of calumny and slurs, you should appreciate that this is not because of wrinkles, grey hair and physical enfeeblement: no, its most cruel feature is that it makes the soul lose touch with its memories of the other world, attaches it to this one, wraps it and constricts it (since it retains the shape it gained while it was acted on by the body). On the other hand, a soul which, although captured,〈remains only a short while in a body before being released〉by the gods and departing, springs back up to its natural state as if, although it had been bent, it retained its suppleness and malleability. Just as fire is quickly rekindled again and returns to its former state if it is relit straight after being extinguished,〈but the longer the interval, the harder it is to relight, so too the most fortunate soul is the one which is able, in the poet's words,〉'to pass as swiftly as possible through Hades' portals', before a strong love of the things of this world has been engendered in it and before it has become moulded to the body by being softened and melted as if by chemicals.

Our ancient ancestral customs and rules are a better guide to the truth in these matters. People do not pour libations for their infant children when they die or perform any of the other rites that in other cases one is expected to perform for the dead, because babies have not been pervaded by earth or any earthly things. Again, people do not linger over their burial or at their grave or in laying out their bodies, because the laws regarding death at that age do not allow it, on the grounds that it is irreligious to grieve for those who have exchanged this world for a fate, and a place too, that is better and more divine. Since mistrusting these laws is more problematic than trusting them, let us make sure that our external actions conform to their injunctions, and that our internal state is even more untainted, pure and restrained than our external activity. cM6Xavbh5GFrQyhZFNZU8D25Do6nY4cVP3t7fzQUDoyhmqn5AdTGKMGc6JifzO9D