How the Ancients Coped With Grief and Loss

"The Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) is the master of the "consolation," a letter written for the express purpose of comforting someone who has been bereaved. Seneca wrote at least three consolations, to Marcis, to Polybius, and to Helvia. In the Consolation to Helvia, he comforts his own mother Helvia on "losing" him to exile-an unusual case, and literary innovation, of the lamented consoling the lamenter."

"The emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE) had at least 14 children with his wife Faustina, but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and paraphrases Homer in the Iliad: Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines."

"First, Marcus, remember that life is given to us with death as a precondition. Some people die sooner than others, but life, on a cosmic scale, is so short that, really, it makes no difference. Even children are known to die-indeed, they often do-and these, Marcus, simply happened to be your own. A human life, however long or short, or great or small, is of little historical and no cosmic consequence."

Seneca composed consolations—letters meant to comfort the bereaved—and employed cognitive reframing techniques familiar in antiquity. Marcus Aurelius endured the loss of many children and framed them as leaves in the Meditations, echoing Homeric imagery about seasonal loss and renewal. Imagined counsel emphasizes that death is intrinsic to life, individual lives are brief and cosmically insignificant, and child mortality was a historical reality. Consolation prescribes shifting attachment from possession to acceptance of transience and finding solace in Stoic understanding and virtuous living rather than in historical or cosmic importance.

Read at Psychology Today