Personal Grief and Public Mourning in Plutarch's Consolation to His Wife

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Plutarch's consolation letter to his wife is not merely an act of public posturing but a moving personal document, a public statement on correct grieving, and a demonstration of the syncretistic trend in philosophy in early Imperial times. The letter can be connected to a tradition of ancient consolatory activities which established an ancient form of psychotherapy. Here I draw particular attention to the syncretistic aspect of philosophical stances. The case study provides a new and richer interpretation of this remarkable document, opening up further avenues for the study of the ancient consolation genre.

Plutarch’s Cosmological Ethics

“…in general the secondary literature is vast; see esp. Pomeroy 1999 andBaltussen 2009;cf. also Claassen 2004 (focusing on the text as a public memento).…”

Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence for Infancy in the Roman World

“…In other words, a one-year-old child would be mourned for a month, but for infants who had not yet lived a year there was no mourning period according to law. Here the relationship between literature and archaeology proves to be of vital importance in understanding the discrepancies between public displays of mourning, which may be what Ulpian and Plutarch refer to, and private expressions of grief that are recognisable in funerary customs and burial assemblages (Rawson 2003a: 281;Baltussen 2009). Regulations on mourning, and criticism of displays of grief, relate to the public sphere, not necessarily to sentiments expressed or activities conducted in private.…”

Infant death and burial in Roman Italy

“…6 In light of the apparent invisibility of the youngest children in Italian cemeteries and the unreliability of contemporary written comments on social attitudes and decorum, my study focuses primarily on the mortuary evidence for children under the age of one year in Italy from 1 For a discussion of this document in the context of the genre of consolation, see Baltussen 2009. Equally, it is critical to study all children in skeletal assemblages to reconstruct population size and mortality, fertility and birth rates in Roman society in this region.…”