To Marcia on Consolation
26 chapters in Stewart
The consolation to Marcia is written to a woman who had been mourning her son Metilius for three years. Marcia was the daughter of the historian Cremutius Cordus, whose books were burned under Tiberius and whom she had restored to the public; Seneca opens with that courage. He then sets two examples side by side, Octavia, who never ceased to mourn Marcellus, and Livia, who laid her grief in the tomb with Drusus, and argues from what is common to all, that everyone is born to lose and that a short life may be a complete one. The last chapters give the dead father speaking to his daughter.
The English text here is Aubrey Stewart’s, in his Minor Dialogues of 1889, where the work is the sixth book of the dialogues. Stewart numbers the chapters from I to XXVI, and Baillard’s French edition counts the same twenty-six, chapter for chapter; an extract is cited as To Marcia on Consolation, IX, with the line of the file. The passages of this work in the app are counted, not listed.
Structure
| Book | Chapters | Concordance |
|---|---|---|
| I | 26 | chapter for chapter with Baillard, 1861 |
In the edition of Aubrey Stewart, 1889
Nevertheless, the mourning which public opinion enjoins is more than nature insists upon.
How can you think that anything will not happen, when you know that it may happen to many men, and has happened to many?
Whatever gift Fortune bestows upon a man, let him think while he enjoys it, that it will prove as fickle as the goddess from whom it came.
Bid any number of individuals tell you the story of their lives: you will find that all have paid some penalty for being born.
Now every evil is just as great as we consider it to be: we have, therefore, the remedy in our own hands.
Born for a very brief space of time, we regard this life as an inn which we are soon to quit that it may be made ready for the coming guest.
In Stoic+: 14 passages of this work, each with its reference.
Seneca and Epictetus are in Stoic+: 14 passages of this work in the app, each with its reference.