Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - The Original Classic Edition. Cicero Marcus

can get rid of it, we need never have been subject to it. It must be acknowledged, then, that men take up grief wilfully and knowingly; and this appears from the patience of those who, after they have been exercised in afflictions and are better able to bear whatever befalls them, suppose themselves hardened against fortune; as that person in Euripides,

       Had this the first essay of fortune been, And I no storms thro' all my life had seen, Wild as a colt I'd broke from reason's sway; But frequent griefs have taught me to obey.46

       As, then, the frequent bearing of misery makes grief the lighter, we must necessarily perceive that the cause and original of it does not lie in the calamity itself. Your principal philosophers, or lovers of wisdom, though they have not yet arrived at perfect wisdom, are not they sensible that they are in the greatest evil? For they are foolish, and foolishness is the greatest of all evils, and yet they lament not. How shall we account for this? Because opinion is not fixed upon that kind of evil, it is not our opinion that it is right, meet, and our duty to be uneasy because we are not all wise men. Whereas this opinion is strongly affixed to that uneasiness where

       mourning is concerned, which is the greatest of all grief. Therefore Aristotle, when he blames some ancient philosophers for imagining that by their genius they had brought philosophy 121to the highest perfection, says, they must be either extremely foolish or extremely vain; but that he himself could see that great improvements had been made therein in a few years, and that philosophy would in a little time arrive at perfection. And Theophrastus is reported to have reproached nature at his death for giving to stags and crows so long a life, which was of no use to them, but allowing only so short a span to men, to whom length of days would have been of the greatest use; for if the life of man could have been lengthened, it would have been able to provide itself with all kinds of learning, and with arts in the greatest perfection. He lamented, therefore, that he was dying just when he had begun to discover these. What! does not every grave and distinguished philosopher acknowledge himself ignorant of many things, and confess that there

       are many things which he must learn over and over again? And yet, though these men are sensible that they are standing still in the very midway of folly, than which nothing can be worse, they are under no great affliction, because no opinion that it is their duty to lament is ever mingled with this knowledge. What shall we say of those who think it unbecoming in a man to grieve? among whom we may reckon Q. Maximus, when he buried his son that had been consul, and L. Paulus, who lost two sons within a few days of one another. Of the same opinion was M. Cato, who lost his son just after he had been elected praetor, and many others, whose names I have collected in my book on Consolation. Now what made these men so easy, but their persuasion that grief and lamentation was not becoming in a man? Therefore, as some give themselves up to grief from an opinion that it is right so to do, they refrained themselves, from an opinion that it was discreditable; from which we may infer that grief is owing more to opinion than nature.

       XXIX. It may be said, on the other side, Who is so mad as to grieve of his own accord? Pain proceeds from nature, which you must submit to, say they, agreeably to what even your own Crantor teaches, for it presses and gains upon you unavoidably, and cannot possibly be resisted. So that the very same Oileus, in Sophocles, who had before comforted Telamon on the death of Ajax, on 122hear-ing of the death of his own son, is broken-hearted. On this alteration of his mind we have these lines:

       Show me the man so well by wisdom taught

       That what he charges to another's fault,

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       When like affliction doth himself betide,

       True to his own wise counsel will abide.47

       Now, when they urge these things, their endeavor is to prove that nature is absolutely and wholly irresistible; and yet the same people allow that we take greater grief on ourselves than nature requires. What madness is it, then, in us to require the same from others? But there are many reasons for our taking grief on us. The first is from the opinion of some evil, on the discovery and certainty of which grief comes of course. Besides, many people are persuaded that they are doing something very acceptable to the dead when they lament bitterly over them. To these may be added a kind of womanish superstition, in imagining that when they have been stricken by the afflictions sent by the Gods, to acknowledge themselves afflicted and humbled by them is the readiest way of appeasing them. But most men appear to be unaware what contradictions these things are full of. They commend those who die calmly,

       but they blame those who can bear the loss of another with the same calmness, as if it were possible that it should be true, as is occasionally said in love speeches, that any one can love another more than himself. There is, indeed, something excellent in this, and, if you examine it, something no less just than true, that we love those who ought to be most dear to us as well as we love ourselves; but to love them more than ourselves is absolutely impossible; nor is it desirable in friendship that I should love my friend more than myself, or that he should love me so; for this would occasion much confusion in life, and break in upon all the duties of it.

       123XXX. But we will speak of this another time: at present it is sufficient not to attribute our misery to the loss of our friends, nor

       to love them more than, if they themselves could be sensible of our conduct, they would approve of, or at least not more than we do ourselves. Now as to what they say, that some are not at all appeased by our consolations; and, moreover, as to what they add, that

       the comforters themselves acknowledge they are miserable when fortune varies the attack and falls on them--in both these cases