End of June 43 BCE: To Brutus (at Dyrrachium) from Cicero (at Rome)

Cicero consoles Brutus on the death of his wife

From Cicero to Brutus, greetings.

I would perform the duty you performed for me when I was grieving, if I did not know that your grief does not need those remedies for anguish that you used to lessen mine.¹ I hope that you find your own healing process now easier than you found mine then.² 

But it is not like a man as great as yourself to be unable to do the very thing that you instructed others in. For my part, both the reasoning you put together and your influence deterred me from excessive mourning. When you thought I was acting more pathetically than is proper for a man (and especially one used to consoling others), you found fault with me, and wrote to me in more severe terms than is your habit. So, since I value your good opinion highly and truly respect it, I pulled myself together and considered that the things I had learnt, read, and been taught had more weight with your authority behind them.

At that time, Brutus, I owed nothing except to duty and nature—but now you are necessarily on a public stage, as they say. Since the eyes of not just your army, but the whole people—almost the whole world—are fixed on you, it is not at all right that as the man who makes us all braver, you should seem yourself to have a weak spirit.

So: you have been struck by grief; you have lost something unlike anything else on earth. For a wound this serious, you must grieve, so that the absence of any sensation of grief does not make you more upset than simply grieving. Doing so in moderation is of use to others, but for you it is a necessity.

I would have written more, if what I have written to you were not already too much. We await you and your army, without which, even if everything else goes the way we want, I feel we shall hardly really be free. I shall write more about the whole political situation (and perhaps with more certainty) in the letter I plan to give to our dear Vetus.

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Latin text of Cic. ad Brut. 1.9 | Glossary | Historia Civilis video overview of 44-43 BCE

1. Brutus had written to console Cicero on the death of his daughter Tullia in 45 BCE. Cicero wrote to Atticus (Cic. Att. 12.14) that Brutus’ letter ‘contained a great deal of good sense, but nothing to give me any comfort’ (trans. Shuckburgh). Cicero later (Cic. Att. 13.6) described the same letter as ‘a scolding’.

2. From Servilia and her Family by Susan Treggiari: ‘In the middle of all the other troubles, Brutus’s wife, Porcia, died. This happened probably in early summer 43 (and certainly well before Cicero’s death on 7 December). Cicero, writing the statutory letter of consolation, reminded Brutus of the philosophical consolation he had administered when Cicero lost his only daughter. […] The fact of Porcia’s death well before Philippi is therefore reliably attested.

A letter, on the authenticity of which scholars are divided and which claims to be from Brutus to Atticus, suggests that her health had been giving cause for concern to Brutus’s friends. Plutarch rejects stories that she committed suicide by swallowing hot coals after she knew that Brutus was dead. He knew of a letter in which Brutus accused his friends of neglecting Porcia and said that ‘because of illness she chose to leave her life’. I think Plutarch can be interpreted as meaning that, in Brutus’s view, she chose to die, in the sense that she gave up fighting her illness, and that neglect by the philoi (a word which covers friends and family) contributed to her despair. This might well mean that he thought Servilia was not helping to keep up her morale. But we do not know that this letter was authentic either. If it was, we do not know that Brutus’s reading of the situation was right.

There is a tradition, going back to the time of Augustus or Tiberius, that Porcia killed herself deliberately, by swallowing hot coals. The same method and motive (wifely devotion) are attributed to Servilia, the daughter (probably) of Iunia and Isauricus, by Velleius (writing c. AD 30). If the identification is right, she was Porcia’s niece by marriage. Both stories are suspect and each weakens the other. But some modern scholars accept that Porcia’s death was a suicide and by this horrible method. There is no hint of that in Cicero’s letter. It would be understandable that he would not allude to the horror, but, if he had known it was suicide, he might surely have praised her heroism and her emulation of her father, Cato. I discount the whole hagiographic tradition. Porcia died of some illness, perhaps made worse by despair. If she had been suffering from illness since the summer of 44, it is understandable that we have no evidence that she was working actively on Brutus’s behalf.’