45 BC 2026
This is an AI modernization of Tusculan Disputations into contemporary English. The original is available from The Latin Library. Also available as an epub.
In February of 45 BC Cicero's daughter Tullia died after childbirth. He was devastated by it in a way his friends found embarrassing. The same year, Caesar finished off the last armies of the opposition and ruled alone, which left Cicero, born in 106 BC and now sixty-one, with no public career and nothing to do. He went out to his country house at Tusculum, in the hills south of Rome, and wrote philosophy at a speed that is hard to credit. The Tusculan Disputations is one result. On Duties, the letter to his son, followed about a year later, and by the end of 43 BC Cicero had been hunted down and killed.
The book covers five days of argument, one topic a day. Death is not an evil. Pain can be endured. Grief is not compulsory and can be treated. The disorders of the soul have cures. Virtue by itself is enough to make a man happy. Each day opens with an essay in Cicero's own voice, addressed to Brutus, and then turns into a conversation: a young companion states a position, and Cicero spends the rest of the day taking it apart. The Latin gives the speakers no names and no labels, so this edition renders the exchanges as dialogue inside the narration rather than as a script.
Two things are worth knowing before starting. The first is that a passion here is not an emotion in the modern sense. Cicero is using the Stoic term for a disorder of the soul, a judgement gone wrong and hardened into a state, and the whole of Book Four is a catalogue of them arranged like a medical textbook, with treatments. The second is that Book Three, on grief, was written by a man who had just buried his child and who does not mention her anywhere in it. He argues that grief comes from an opinion about what has happened rather than from the loss itself, and that opinions can be changed. He is talking to himself, and the book is more moving for never saying so.
The set pieces are the best things in it. Damocles asks to change places with the tyrant Dionysius for a day and is seated under a sword hung by a single horsehair. Cicero describes finding the lost tomb of Archimedes outside Syracuse when he was a young official there, overgrown in brambles, identified by the sphere and cylinder carved on it. Spartan boys are flogged at the altar without a sound. Alcibiades weeps in front of Socrates.
The translation is from Cicero's Latin, all five books complete.
Book I: On the Contempt of Death
Book IV: On the Other Disorders of the Mind
Book V: Whether Virtue Alone Is Sufficient for a Happy Life
Now that I have finally been freed — completely, or at least mostly — from my labors as a courtroom advocate and my duties in the Senate, I have come back, Brutus, with you urging me on more than anyone, to the studies I never let go of in my heart. Circumstances pushed them aside, and a long interval interrupted them, but I have taken them up again. And since the method and training of every art that bears on living rightly is contained in the study of wisdom — the study we call philosophy — I decided that this was the thing I should light up in Latin. Not because philosophy can't be learned from Greek books and Greek teachers, but because it has always been my judgment that our own people have either made their discoveries more wisely than the Greeks did, on their own, or improved whatever they took from them — at least in the fields they judged worth their effort.
When it comes to character, the customs of daily life, and the running of home and family, we manage things better, and with more style. As for the state, our ancestors — beyond any dispute — shaped it with better institutions and better laws. And what should I even say about war, where our people have counted for much by courage, and for even more by discipline? Then there are the things they achieved by nature rather than by book-learning: here neither Greece nor any nation on earth stands comparison with us. Where else has there ever been such seriousness, such steadiness, such greatness of spirit, such integrity, such good faith — such outstanding excellence of every kind — that it could be set beside our ancestors?
Where Greece did beat us was in learning and in every branch of literature — and it is easy to win when your opponent doesn't take the field. Among the Greeks, the oldest class of learned men is the poets: Homer and Hesiod lived before Rome was even founded, and Archilochus while Romulus was king. We took up poetry much later. It was roughly five hundred and ten years after Rome's founding that Livius Andronicus staged the first play, in the consulship of Gaius Claudius, son of Caecus, and Marcus Tuditanus — one year before Ennius was born; and Ennius was older than Plautus and Naevius. So poets came late to us, late to be known and late to be welcomed. True, Cato's Origins tells us that guests at banquets used to sing about the great deeds of famous men while a flute-player accompanied them. Still, a speech of Cato's makes it clear that this art carried no honor: he throws it in the face of Marcus Nobilior, as a disgrace, that he brought poets along to his province. (The poet that consul brought to Aetolia was, as we know, Ennius.) The less honor poets received, the less anyone pursued the art — and yet the few men of real talent who did take it up have not fallen far short of the glory of the Greeks.
Do we really imagine that if painting had brought praise to Fabius, one of our noblest names, we wouldn't have produced plenty of Polyclituses and Parrhasiuses of our own? Honor feeds the arts. Glory is what sets everyone on fire for their work, and whatever a society looks down on always lies flat. The Greeks decided that the height of education lay in singing and in playing strings. So Epaminondas — in my judgment the first man of Greece — is said to have played the lyre brilliantly, while Themistocles, some years earlier, was written off as half-educated because he waved away the lyre at a dinner party. That is why musicians flourished in Greece: everyone studied music, and a man who didn't know it was not considered properly educated.
Geometry stood at the very top of their honors, and nothing shone brighter among them than a mathematician. We have trimmed that art down to whatever is useful for surveying land and doing sums. The orator, on the other hand, we embraced quickly — at first not a learned man, but a man quick at speaking; the learning came later. Tradition says that Galba, Africanus, and Laelius were learned men, and that even Cato, who came before them in age, was a serious student; then Lepidus, Carbo, and the Gracchi, and after them orators so great, right down to our own day, that we yield little or nothing to the Greeks. But philosophy has lain flat up to this very moment. It has had no light from Latin literature at all. That is the art I must raise up and set shining — so that if I did my fellow citizens some good while I held office, I can go on doing them good, if I am able, in retirement.
And I have to work at this all the harder because there are said to be many Latin books already — written carelessly, by men who were fine men, yes, but not learned enough. It can certainly happen that a person thinks well and still can't put his thoughts into polished words. But to commit your thoughts to writing when you can neither arrange them, nor make them clear, nor give the reader any pleasure to draw him along — that is a man abusing both his leisure and the alphabet, with no self-restraint at all. And so these authors read their own books aloud to their own circle, and nobody else ever touches them except people hoping the same license to scribble will be extended to them. So if my hard work has added anything to the reputation of oratory, I will work far harder still to open the springs of philosophy — the source from which even that eloquence flowed.
Aristotle, a man of supreme genius, knowledge, and range, was stung by the fame of the rhetorician Isocrates and began teaching young men to speak, joining practical wisdom to eloquence. In the same way, I have decided not to lay down my old passion for speaking while I work in this greater and richer art. For I have always held that the complete philosophy is the one that can speak on the biggest questions fully and beautifully. I have thrown myself into that practice so seriously that I have even dared to hold sessions in the Greek style. Just recently, after you left, when a number of friends were staying with me at my place in Tusculum, I tried out what I could do in that line. I used to declaim practice speeches for the courtroom, and no one kept at it longer than I did; this is now the declamation of my old age. I would ask someone to name whatever topic he wanted to hear about, and then — sitting or walking — I argued it out.
And so I have gathered the "schools," as the Greeks call them, of five days into the same number of books. It worked like this: after the one who wanted to listen had said what he thought, I argued against him. That, as you know, is the old Socratic method — arguing against the other person's position; Socrates believed it was the easiest way to find what comes nearest the truth. But to lay our discussions out more conveniently, I will present them as a scene happening in front of you, not as a report. So let the opening go like this.
"Death seems to me an evil," he began.
"For whom?" I asked. "For those who are already dead, or for those who have to die?"
"For both."
"Then it is a misery, since it's an evil?"
"Certainly."
"So the people death has already come for, and the people it is coming for, are both miserable."
"That's how it seems to me."
"Then there is no one who isn't miserable."
"No one at all."
"And if you want to be consistent, everyone who has ever been born or ever will be is not only miserable but miserable forever. If you were calling only those who have to die miserable, you wouldn't be leaving out a single living person — everyone has to die — but at least misery would end at death. Since the dead are miserable too, we are born into a misery that never ends. It follows that the people who died a hundred thousand years ago are miserable — or rather, everyone who was ever born."
"That is exactly what I think."
"Then tell me, please: is this the sort of thing that frightens you? Three-headed Cerberus down in the underworld, the roar of Cocytus, the ferry-crossing of Acheron? Tantalus,
worn out with thirst, the water touching his chin?
"Or that famous line, how
Sisyphus rolls his stone, sweating and straining, and gains not one single inch?
"Perhaps you dread the unbending judges too, Minos and Rhadamanthus. Before that bench no Lucius Crassus will defend you, no Marcus Antonius; and since the case will be heard before Greek judges, you won't even be able to retain Demosthenes. You will have to plead your own cause, in front of an enormous crowd. Maybe that is what you're afraid of, and that's why you count death an everlasting evil."
"Do you really think I'm crazy enough to believe those stories?"
"You don't believe them?"
"Not for a moment."
"That's a shame."
"Why on earth?"
"Because I could have been very eloquent arguing against them."
"Who couldn't be, on a subject like that? What work is it to knock down these monsters dreamed up by poets and painters?"
"And yet the philosophers have filled whole books arguing against exactly those things."
"More fool them. Who is so witless that any of that could move him?"
"Well then: if no one is miserable in the underworld, there is no one in the underworld at all."
"Agreed, completely."
"Then where are these miserable people of yours? What address do they occupy? If they exist, they have to be somewhere."
"But I think they are nowhere."
"So they don't exist at all?"
"Just so — and yet they are miserable for that very reason: because they don't exist."
"I'd rather have you scared of Cerberus than talking as carelessly as that."
"Meaning what?"
"The same person you say doesn't exist, you say exists. Where is that sharp mind of yours? To call someone miserable is to say that a person who doesn't exist, exists."
"I'm not so dull that I'd say that."
"Then what are you saying?"
"That Marcus Crassus, for example, is miserable because death stripped him of that enormous fortune; that Pompeius is miserable because he was robbed of all that glory; that everyone, in short, is miserable who has lost this light of day."
"You've circled straight back. To be miserable, they have to exist — and a moment ago you denied that the dead exist. If they don't exist, they can't be anything. And in that case they can't even be miserable."
"Maybe I'm not managing to say what I actually feel. The thing itself — not existing, after you have existed — seems to me the depth of misery."
"What — worse than never having existed at all? By that logic, the people not yet born are miserable already, because they don't exist; and we ourselves, if we're going to be miserable after death, were miserable before we were born. But I don't remember being miserable before I was born. If your memory is better than mine, I'd love to know what you recall of yourself back then."
"Very funny — as if I'd said the unborn are miserable, and not the dead."
"So you say the dead exist."
"No. I say they are miserable precisely because they don't exist — though they once did."
"Don't you hear the contradiction? What could be more self-contradictory than for something that doesn't exist to be — not just miserable — but anything at all? When you walk out the Capena gate and see the tombs of Calatinus, the Scipios, the Servilii, and the Metelli, do you consider those men miserable?"
"Since you keep pinning me down over a word, from now on I won't say they are miserable. I'll just say 'miserable' — by itself — for the very reason that they don't exist."
"So you're not saying 'Marcus Crassus is miserable,' only 'miserable Marcus Crassus'?"
"Exactly."
"As if anything you assert that way didn't have to either be so or not be so! Haven't you had even a first taste of logic? Because this is one of its first lessons: every proposition — that's the word that occurs to me for the moment for what the Greeks call an axioma; I'll use a different one later if I find something better — every proposition is a statement that is either true or false. So when you say 'miserable Marcus Crassus,' either you are saying 'Marcus Crassus is miserable,' so that we can judge whether it's true or false, or you are saying nothing at all."
"All right — I now concede that the dead are not miserable, since you've wrung out of me the admission that what doesn't exist at all can't even manage to be miserable. But what about us, the living, who have death waiting? Aren't we miserable? What sweetness can there be in life when, day and night, you have to keep thinking that at any moment — this one, maybe — you must die?"
"So do you realize how much evil you have just lifted off the human condition?"
"How so?"
"Because if death were miserable for the dead too, life would hold an evil that is infinite and everlasting. As it is, I can see the finish line, and once the race is run, there is nothing further to fear. But you seem to me to be following the maxim of Epicharmus — a sharp man, and, for a Sicilian, not without wit."
"What maxim? I don't know it."
"I'll say it in Latin if I can. You know I'm no more in the habit of dropping Greek into a Latin conversation than Latin into a Greek one."
"Quite right, too. But what is this maxim of Epicharmus?"
I gave it to him:
I do not want to die — but that I will be dead? That means nothing at all to me.
"Now I recognize the Greek. But since you've forced me to concede that the dead are not miserable, take the next step, if you can: convince me that having to die isn't miserable either."
"That is no work at all. I'm after bigger game."
"How is it no work at all? And what exactly is this bigger game?"
"Like this. Since there is no evil after death, death itself can't be an evil either — because the time that comes right after death is the time you concede holds no evil. So even having to die is no evil; it is only having to arrive at a place we both agree is not evil."
"Spell that out more fully, please. These thorny little arguments force me to admit things before I actually agree with them. But what are these greater things you say you're working toward?"
"To teach you, if I can, that death is not merely not an evil — it is a positive good."
"I won't demand that much, but I am eager to hear it. Even if you fall short of what you want, you will still prove that death is no evil. And I won't interrupt you; I'd rather hear you speak straight through."
"But what if I ask you a question — won't you answer?"
"That would be arrogant of me. But unless it's really necessary, I'd rather you didn't ask."
"I'll do as you wish, and explain what you want as well as I can — but not like Pythian Apollo, as if everything I say were fixed and certain. I am one small human being among many, chasing what is probable by best guess. Seeing what looks like the truth is as far as I can go; certainties are for the men who claim such things can be known for sure, and who advertise themselves as wise."
"Do it however you see fit. We are ready to listen."
So I began. Death itself, then — the thing that seems the most familiar in the world — is the first thing we have to examine: what is it? Some think death is the departure of the soul from the body. Others hold that there is no departure at all — that soul and body perish together, and the soul is snuffed out inside the body. Of those who think the soul does depart, some say it scatters immediately, some that it lasts a long while, and some that it lasts forever. And as for what the soul itself actually is, or where it lives, or where it comes from — the disagreement is enormous. To some, the soul is the heart itself. That is why in Latin the senseless are excordes, "missing a heart," the deranged vecordes, "wrong in the heart," and the like-minded concordes, "hearts together"; it is why the shrewd Nasica, twice consul, was nicknamed Corculum, "Little Heart," and why the old verse praises "that man of outstanding heart, shrewd Aelius Sextus."
Empedocles thinks the soul is the blood that soaks the region of the heart. To others, it seemed that a certain part of the brain holds the soul's command post. Others accept neither the heart itself nor any part of the brain as the soul, but say instead that the heart — or the brain — is the soul's seat and home. Others say the soul is breath, anima, and Roman usage is pretty much on their side, as our own words show: we say a dying man "gasps out his breath" and "breathes his last"; we call the brave "full of spirit" and the steady "right-spirited"; we give an oath "from the bottom of the soul." And animus, our very word for soul, comes straight from anima, breath. To Zeno the Stoic, meanwhile, the soul is fire. Now these opinions I've just named — heart, brain, breath, fire — are the common ones; the rest belong mostly to single thinkers. So it was with a number of the ancients long ago, and most recently with Aristoxenus, a musician as well as a philosopher, who said the soul is a certain tension of the body itself — like what singers and string-players call harmonia: from the nature and shape of the whole body, various motions arise, the way notes come off an instrument.
Aristoxenus never strayed far from his own trade, but what he said was something real — and its substance had been stated, and worked out, long before by Plato. Xenocrates denied that the soul has any shape or anything like a body. He said it is number — and the power of number, as Pythagoras had concluded ages earlier, is the greatest power in nature. His teacher Plato imagined a threefold soul. Its ruling part — reason — he placed in the head, as in a citadel; the other two parts, anger and desire, he made reason's subjects and assigned them separate quarters, lodging anger in the chest and desire down below the diaphragm.
Dicaearchus, though, in the conversation he sets in Corinth and lays out in three books, fills the first book with a crowd of learned men debating; in the other two he brings on a certain Pherecrates, an old man from Phthia, descended — so he claims — from Deucalion himself. This Pherecrates argues that the soul is nothing at all: the word is an empty name; it is pointless to speak of "animals" and "animate beings"; there is no soul and no life-breath in man or beast. All that power by which we act or perceive is poured evenly through every living body and cannot be separated from the body — because it is nothing on its own. Nothing exists except body, single and simple, shaped in such a way that it lives and feels through the balanced workings of nature.
Aristotle — who towers far above everyone in both genius and care (I always set Plato apart) — after taking in the four familiar classes of elements from which all things arise, concluded that there is a certain fifth nature, and that mind comes from it. For thinking, foreseeing, learning, teaching, discovering, remembering so many things — loving, hating, desiring, fearing, being distressed, feeling joy — these and everything like them, he holds, are found in none of those four classes. So he adds a fifth class that has no name of its own, and he gives the soul itself a brand-new label: endelecheia, meaning something like continuous, unending motion.
Unless a few have slipped my mind, these are pretty much the opinions about the soul. Democritus we can leave aside — a great man, certainly, but he builds the soul out of smooth, round little particles colliding by pure chance; with that school, there is nothing a mob of atoms can't accomplish.
Which of these opinions is true, let some god decide. Which is most like the truth is a big question. So — would we rather judge between them, or come back to our subject?
"I'd want both, if it were possible," he said, "but it's hard to blend them. So if we can be freed from the fear of death without threshing all of that out, let's do it; but if it can't be done without first settling this question about souls, let's have that now and the other another time."
The course I could see he preferred was, I told him, also the more practical one. For whichever of the opinions I have listed is true, reason will bring us out at the same place: death is either no evil — or a positive good.
For if the soul is heart or blood or brain, then being body, it will perish with the rest of the body. If it is breath, it will perhaps disperse; if fire, it will go out; if it is Aristoxenus's tuning, it will fall out of tune. And what should I say of Dicaearchus, who says the soul is nothing at all? On every one of these views, nothing after death can matter to anyone, because feeling is lost together with life — and to a being that feels nothing, nothing makes the slightest difference either way. The remaining opinions, though, bring hope — if this is the sort of thing that cheers you — that souls, once they have left the body, may make their way to heaven as to their own true home.
"It does cheer me," he said. "First of all, I want it to be true; and even if it isn't, I would still like to be convinced of it."
"Then what do you need my help for? Can I outdo Plato in eloquence? Unroll his book about the soul, and read it carefully. There will be nothing left for you to want."
"I have done exactly that, believe me — many times. But somehow, while I'm reading, I agree with every word; the moment I put the book down and start thinking on my own about the immortality of souls, all that agreement drains away."
"Well then, do you grant this much: souls either survive after death, or death itself destroys them?"
"I grant it."
"And if they survive?"
"Then I concede they are happy."
"And if they perish?"
"Then they are not miserable, since they don't even exist. You forced that concession out of me just now."
"Then how — and why — can you say that death seems to you an evil, when it will either make us happy, if our souls survive, or spare us all misery, if our feeling is gone?"
"Then lay it out, if it's not too much trouble. First — if you can — show that souls survive after death. Then, if that proves too steep a climb (and it is steep), show that death holds no evil at all. Because here is what I'm afraid of: that the evil is exactly this — I don't mean being without sensation, but the fact that we will have to be without it."
For the opinion you want upheld, I answered, we can call on the best authorities there are — which in every kind of case ought to carry the most weight, and usually does. And first of all, we can call antiquity itself: the closer those early generations stood to the beginning of things and to our divine ancestry, the better, perhaps, they saw what was actually true.
And so those men of old — the "ancients," as Ennius calls them — held one conviction planted deep: that there is sensation in death, and that when a person leaves this life, he is not so wiped out as to perish root and branch. You can see this in many things, and above all in the law of the pontiffs and the rites of burial. Men of the greatest minds would never have tended those rites with such care, or fenced their violation with such unforgivable penalties, unless it had been fixed in their hearts that death is not an annihilation that removes and erases everything, but a kind of migration — a change of life — which for famous men and women was usually a road into heaven, while for everyone else the soul was held back here on earth, yet lasted all the same.
That is why, by the belief of our own people,
Romulus in heaven lives out his days with the gods,
as Ennius said, following the common report. That is why, among the Greeks — and from them all the way to us, and clear out to the Ocean — Hercules is held to be a god so great and so ready to help; why Liber, Semele's son, is a god; and why the twin sons of Tyndareus enjoy the same bright fame — the brothers who are said not only to have fought beside the Roman people to victory in battle, but to have carried home the news of it. And Ino, Cadmus's daughter — don't the Greeks call her Leucothea, and don't we call her Matuta? More than that: isn't nearly the whole of heaven — I'll stop the list there — populated from the human race?
And if I tried to dig into the old records and pull out what the Greek writers have handed down, we would find that even the gods reckoned as heaven's oldest families set out for the sky from here among us. Ask which gods have tombs pointed out in Greece. Remember — since you are an initiate — the things handed down in the mysteries. Then you will finally understand how far all this reaches. Those early people had not yet learned the natural science that men began to work at only many years later; they were persuaded of exactly as much as nature's own promptings had taught them. They did not grasp the reasons and causes of things, and they were shaken, again and again, by visions — mostly at night — until it seemed to them that those who had left this life were living still.
Now, the strongest argument anyone offers for believing that gods exist is this: no tribe is so savage, no human being anywhere so wild, that the idea of gods has not taken root in his mind. Many people have crooked notions about the gods — bad habits usually see to that — yet everyone believes in a divine power and a divine nature. And no human conference produced that agreement; the belief was not fixed by custom or enforced by law. But in every matter, the consensus of all nations must be counted as the law of nature. Very well — by the same test — who mourns his own dead without mourning, first and foremost, because he thinks they have been stripped of the good things of life? Take away that belief, and you take away the mourning. No one weeps over his own inconvenience. We may hurt, we may ache; but the wailing of grief, the mourner's tears — those come from believing that the person we loved has lost the good things of life, and feels the loss. And we believe this with nature as our guide, with no argument and no schooling behind it.
But the greatest proof is this: nature herself passes silent judgment in favor of the immortality of souls, in the fact that everyone cares — and cares intensely — about what will happen after death.
He plants trees to serve another age,
as Caecilius Statius says in his Young Comrades. And what is the planter looking to, if not that the ages to come are his business too? So a careful farmer will plant trees whose fruit he will never lay eyes on — and a great man won't plant laws, institutions, a commonwealth? What does having children mean, or carrying a family name forward, or adopting sons, or the care we take over wills, or the grave-monuments themselves and the words we carve on them — what do they all mean, if not that our thoughts stand planted in the future too?
And here is another thing: do you doubt that our sample of nature ought to be taken from nature at its best? And what better nature is there in the human race than the men who consider themselves born to help other people, to protect them, to keep them safe? Hercules has gone to the gods. He never would have gone if he had not paved that road for himself while he was still among men. All this is ancient now, and consecrated by the religion of every people. And in our own republic — what do we suppose all those men were thinking, so many and so great, who laid down their lives for the state? That their names would stop at the same boundary line as their lives? No one ever offered himself to death for his country without a great hope of immortality.
Themistocles could have lived at his ease. So could Epaminondas. So — not to go hunting for examples that are old or foreign — could I. But somehow there clings to our minds a kind of prophecy of the ages to come, and it is in the greatest talents and the loftiest souls that it lives most strongly and shows most plainly. Take that away, and who would be insane enough to spend his whole life in toil and danger?
I have been speaking of statesmen. But what about poets — don't they want to be famous after death? Where else does this come from:
Look, citizens, upon the carved face of old Ennius: this is the man who set your fathers' greatest deeds in song.
He is demanding the wage of glory from the sons of the very men his poetry had covered with glory. And the same poet writes:
Let no one honor me with tears, or make my funeral a weeping. Why? Because I fly, alive, from mouth to mouth among mankind.
But why stop at poets? Craftsmen want fame after death too. When Phidias was not allowed to sign his name to the shield of Minerva, why did he work a likeness of his own face into it? And what about our philosophers? Don't they print their names on the very books they write about despising glory?
Now, if the agreement of all people is the voice of nature, and everyone everywhere agrees that there is something that still concerns those who have departed this life, then we must think so too. And if we judge that the men whose souls stand out in talent or in virtue see the power of nature best — because their own nature is best — then, since it is precisely the best men who most devote themselves to posterity, it is likely that there is something they will still have a feeling for after death.
But just as we believe that the gods exist because nature tells us so, while what they are like we must learn by reason, in the same way we hold that souls survive on the agreement of all nations, while where they dwell and what they are like has to be learned by reason. It was ignorance on exactly that point that invented the underworld and all those terrors which you seemed, not without cause, to despise. Bodies fall to the earth and are covered with soil — humus, which is why we say the dead are "inhumed" — and so people came to believe that the dead spend the rest of their existence underground. Out of that opinion grew enormous errors, and the poets made them bigger.
A packed theater, full of women and boys, shudders when it hears a verse as grand as this:
Here I am — come up from Acheron at last, by a road deep and steep, through caverns built of rough rock hanging huge and jagged overhead, where the thick, stiff gloom of the dead stands still.
And the error had such force — though by now, I think, it has been cleared away — that even people who knew the bodies had been cremated still imagined things happening in the underworld that could neither happen nor be conceived without a body. They simply could not wrap their minds around souls living on their own, so they went looking for some shape and figure for them. That is where Homer's whole Nekyia comes from, his roll call of the summoned dead; that is where my friend Appius got the seances he used to conduct; that is why, in my own neighborhood, we have Lake Avernus, where
souls are called up, wrapped in dark shadow, images of the dead, out of Acheron's deep gate, drawn by blood that deceives them.
Yet they want these images to speak — which is impossible without a tongue, without a palate, without the strength and structure of throat and ribs and lungs. They could see nothing with the mind; they referred everything to the eyes.
It takes a great mind to call the soul away from the senses and pull thought free of habit. So I believe, for my part, that there were others across all those centuries; but as far as written record goes, Pherecydes of Syros was the first to say that the souls of men are everlasting — an ancient authority, certainly: he lived while a king of my own family name, Tullius, sat on the throne. His pupil Pythagoras did the most to strengthen this opinion. He came to Italy while Tarquinius Superbus was king, and he held all of Great Greece — the Greek south of Italy — with the prestige of his teaching and with his personal authority; and for many centuries afterward the name of the Pythagoreans stayed so alive that no one else even seemed educated. But back to the ancients. They rarely gave any reason for their position, except where something could be worked out with numbers and diagrams.
Plato, they say, came to Italy to get to know the Pythagoreans and learned everything they taught, and on the eternity of souls he was the first who not only agreed with Pythagoras but actually supplied a reason for it. Which — unless you have something to say — let us skip, and let us drop this whole hope of immortality.
"What?" he broke in. "You lead me up to the very peak of expectation and then abandon me there? By Hercules, I would rather be wrong with Plato — I know how highly you rate him, and I admire him from your own mouth — than be right with those others."
Well said, I answered — I could happily be wrong in that same man's company myself. Do we really doubt, then, the way we doubt most things? Though here, surely, there is hardly any room for doubt, for the mathematicians convince us of it: the earth sits at the middle of the universe, and compared with the sweep of the whole heaven it amounts to a mere point — the kentron, they call it, the center-spot. And the nature of the four bodies from which all things are generated is this: they have divided their tendencies among themselves, as if by lot. Earthy and moist bodies are carried by their own lean and their own weight at right angles down into the earth and the sea; the remaining two parts, one of fire and one of air, behave the other way around — just as the first two are carried by heaviness and weight into the middle place of the world, these two fly straight up into the region of heaven, whether because their nature reaches for the heights or because lighter things are naturally pushed away by heavier ones. Since all that is established, it should be obvious that souls, once they have left the body, are carried upward — whether they are made of air, which is to say of breath, or of fire.
But if the soul is instead some kind of number — a claim more subtle than it is clear — or that famous fifth nature, which has gone without a name rather than without being understood, then it is purer and more untouched still, and carries itself farthest of all from the earth. The soul, then, is one of these things — otherwise so lively a mind would be lying sunk in the heart or the brain, or in Empedocles' blood. As for Dicaearchus, and with him Aristoxenus, his contemporary and fellow student — learned men, no question — let us pass them by. One of them seems never to have felt so much as an ache of grief, since he cannot perceive that he has a soul at all; the other is so delighted with his own music that he keeps trying to carry it over into these questions. Harmonia we can understand from the intervals between sounds, whose varied combinations produce many harmonies; but what harmony the arrangement of limbs and the figure of a body with no soul in it could produce, I do not see. He would do better, learned as he truly is, to leave all this to his teacher Aristotle and stick to teaching music. There is good advice in that Greek proverb: let each man practice the craft he knows.
And that random collision of smooth, round little bodies — let us throw it out root and branch, even though Democritus insists his atoms are warmed and breathing, which is to say, alive. Now this soul of ours, if it belongs to one of the four kinds out of which everything is said to be made, consists of fiery air — that seems to be the view Panaetius likes best — and it must make for the heights. For these two elements, fire and air, have no downward pull in them; they always seek what is above. So if souls are scattered, that happens far from the earth; and if they last and keep their form, then all the more certainly they must be carried to heaven, breaking apart and dividing this thick, congealed air that lies nearest the earth. For the soul is warmer — say rather hotter — than the air I just called thick and congealed. You can tell from this: our bodies, built out of the earthy class of elements, are kept warm by the heat of the soul.
Add this: the soul escapes and breaks through that air I keep mentioning all the more easily because nothing is faster than the soul. No speed can compete with the speed of the soul. So if it stays uncorrupted and true to itself, it must fly in such a way as to pierce and divide this whole lower sky, where the clouds and rains and winds are massed, damp and murky with the earth's exhalations. When the soul has climbed past that region and met and recognized a nature like its own, it settles among fires blended of thin air and the sun's tempered warmth, and stops rising. For once it has found a lightness and heat like its own, it hangs as if balanced between equal weights and moves in no direction at all; and that, at last, is its natural home — when it has broken through to what is like itself. There, lacking nothing, it will be fed and sustained by the same things that sustain and feed the stars.
And since the torches of the body inflame us toward nearly every desire — and burn all the hotter because we envy the people who already have what we are longing for — we will truly be happy when we have left our bodies behind and with them all desire and all rivalry. What we do now, in our moments free of care — wanting to gaze at something, to go and see it — we will do then with far more freedom, giving our whole selves over to contemplating and examining things. For nature has planted in our minds an insatiable desire to see the truth; and the very borders of those regions we will have reached, by making the heavens easier to know, will only feed the desire to know them.
It was this beauty, seen even from the earth, that kindled that "ancestral and inherited" philosophy, as Theophrastus calls it, set alight by the desire for knowledge. And those will enjoy it most who longed to see clearly with the mind's eye even while they lived on this earth, wrapped in fog. If people now feel they have achieved something because they have seen the mouth of the Pontus, and those narrows threaded by the ship that was named Argo
because in her the chosen men of Argos sailed out to fetch the ram's golden fleece,
or because they have seen the straits of the Ocean,
where the greedy wave divides Europe from Libya,
then what kind of spectacle do we think it will be when we can look out over the whole earth — its position, its shape, its outline; the regions where people can live, and the regions that lie empty of all cultivation, locked in extremes of cold or heat?
Even now, after all, it is not with our eyes that we see what we see. There is no sensation in the body itself; as not only the natural scientists teach but the doctors too, who have seen the body opened and laid bare, there are passages — channels, as it were — bored from the seat of the soul to the eyes, the ears, the nose. That is why we often neither see nor hear, though our eyes and ears are open and perfectly sound, when we are blocked by deep thought or by the force of some illness. Which makes it easy to grasp that it is the soul that sees and hears, not those organs, which are only, so to speak, the soul's windows — and through them the mind can perceive nothing unless it is present and paying attention. And what about this: with one and the same mind we take in the most unlike things — color, taste, heat, smell, sound. The soul could never recognize all five from its five messengers unless everything were referred to it, and it alone were judge of everything. And these things will surely be seen far more purely and clearly when the soul has arrived, free at last, where nature is carrying it.
For as things stand, although nature has built those openings that lead from the body to the soul with the most cunning craftsmanship, still they are somehow fenced about with earthy, clotted matter. But when there is nothing left but soul, nothing standing in the way will keep it from perceiving each thing exactly as it is. I could go on as long as you like, if the subject demanded it, about how many, how varied, and how vast the spectacles are that the soul will enjoy in the regions of heaven.
When I think about those spectacles, I often find myself marveling at the arrogance of certain philosophers who are so awestruck by the knowledge of nature that they pour out exultant thanks to its discoverer and founder, and worship him as a god. He has freed them, they say, from the cruelest of masters: everlasting terror, fear by night and by day. What terror? What fear? Is there one doddering old grandmother left who is afraid of the things that you, apparently, would tremble at if you had never studied physics —
the high halls of Acheron, the realm of Orcus, death's pale country, places clouded in darkness?
Isn't a philosopher ashamed to boast that he does not fear these things and has discovered they are false? From which you can gather how sharp these men are by nature: left untaught, they would have believed it all.
And what a splendid prize their learning has won them — the lesson that when the day of death arrives, they will perish altogether. Suppose that is true; I am not contesting anything. What is there in it to celebrate, or to boast about? Yet for my part, nothing occurs to me to show why the view of Pythagoras and Plato should not be the true one. Even if Plato offered no reason at all — see how much weight I give the man — his sheer authority would break my resistance. But in fact he has brought so many reasons that he plainly wanted to convince everyone else, and most certainly convinced himself.
But a great many pull the other way, and sentence souls to death as if they were criminals convicted on a capital charge. And the eternity of souls seems unbelievable to them for exactly one reason: they cannot picture, cannot grasp in thought, what a soul is like without the body. As if they understood what it is like inside the body — its shape, its size, its address! If everything that is now hidden in a living man lay open to view, do they think the soul would come into sight? Or is its texture so fine that it would slip past the eye?
Let the people who say they cannot conceive of a soul without a body chew on that — and then let them see how well they conceive of it inside the body. For my part, when I contemplate the nature of the soul, it is a far harder and darker question what the soul is like inside the body — a house not its own, so to speak — than what it will be like when it has left, and come out into the free heaven as into its true home. For unless the rule is that we can never understand anything we have never seen, we certainly can embrace in thought both God himself and the divine soul set free from the body. Dicaearchus and Aristoxenus, because it was hard to understand what the soul is and what it is like, declared there was no soul at all.
Of all feats, this is surely the greatest: for the soul to see the soul itself. And that, no doubt, is the whole force of Apollo's precept telling each of us to know himself. He is not, I think, ordering us to get acquainted with our limbs, our height, our figure. We are not bodies; and when I say these things to you, I am not talking to your body. So when the god says "Know yourself," he is saying this: "Know your soul." The body is only a kind of vessel, a container for the soul; whatever your soul does is done by you. If knowing the soul were not something divine, this precept — the work of some keener mind — would never have been credited to a god.
But if the soul is not to know what the soul is like, then tell me, please: will it not know even that it exists? Not even that it moves? Out of that question grew Plato's famous argument, which Socrates lays out in the Phaedrus and which I set into the sixth book of my Republic:
"What always moves is eternal. But whatever brings motion to something else, while it is itself set moving from outside, must come to the end of its life when its motion comes to an end. Only what moves itself, then — because it never abandons itself — never stops moving. More than that: for everything else that moves, this is the fountain, this is the first principle of motion.
"And a first principle has no origin. Everything arises out of the first principle, but the principle itself can be born from nothing else — for it would be no first principle if it were begotten from somewhere else. And since it never arises, it never perishes either. A first principle once extinguished will never be reborn from anything else and will never create anything else out of itself, since everything must arise from a first principle. So it follows that motion begins from what moves itself; and that can neither be born nor die — or else the whole heaven must fall in and all nature grind to a halt, never again to find any force to strike it into its first motion. Since it is plain, then, that what moves itself is eternal, who is there who would deny that this is the nature souls were given? Everything that is driven by an outside push is soulless; but what has a soul is stirred by a motion that is inward and its own — for this is the soul's peculiar nature and power. And if the soul is the one thing among all things that moves itself, then certainly it was never born, and it is eternal."
Let all the plebeian philosophers band together — that seems to me the right name for everyone who breaks away from Plato and Socrates and that family — and not only will they never explain anything so elegantly, they will not even understand how subtly this conclusion has been drawn. The soul, then, senses that it moves; and in the moment it senses that, it senses this too: that it moves by its own power, not another's, and that it can never be abandoned by itself. From which its eternity follows — unless you have something to say against it.
"For my part," he said, "I would be glad if not even a stray thought against it crossed my mind. That is how much I favor the position."
Well then, I went on: do you rate the next arguments any lighter — the ones declaring that there is something divine in the souls of men? If I could see how such things could be born, I could also see how they might perish. Blood, bile, phlegm, bones, sinews, veins — the whole shape of the limbs and of the body entire — I think I can say what they were compounded from and how they were made. Even the soul itself: if there were nothing in it beyond the fact that we live by it, I would suppose a man's life was sustained by nature exactly as a vine's is, or a tree's — we say those things "live" too. And if the human soul had nothing in it but pursuing and avoiding, that much it would share with the beasts.
But first of all it has memory — and a memory without limit, of things beyond counting. Plato holds that memory is actually recollection of an earlier life. In the book called the Meno, Socrates puts to a small boy some questions in geometry, about measuring a square. The boy answers them the way a boy would; and yet the questions are so easy that, answering one step at a time, he arrives exactly where he would have arrived if he had studied geometry. Socrates' conclusion: learning is nothing other than remembering. And he works this theme out far more carefully in the conversation he held on the very day he left this life. There he teaches that anyone at all, however untrained he appears, shows by answering a good questioner well that he is not learning those things in that moment but recognizing them again by memory. And it could not possibly happen, he argues, that from childhood we carry notions of so many great matters planted and as it were sealed into our souls — the Greeks call them ennoiai, inborn concepts — unless the soul, before it ever entered the body, had been alive and flourishing in the knowledge of things.
And since — as Plato argues everywhere — nothing truly is if it arises and perishes, and only that truly is which stays forever such as it is (idea is his name for it; ours is "form"), the soul, shut up in the body, could not have discovered these things while it was there. It knew them already, and brought the knowledge in with it. And with that, our amazement at the sheer range of its knowledge disappears. The soul does not see its ideas clearly right away, when it has suddenly moved into so strange and so disordered a dwelling; but once it has collected and refreshed itself, then it recognizes them by remembering. So learning is nothing but recollection.
But I find myself marveling at memory in an even deeper way. What exactly is the thing by which we remember? What power does it have? Where does its nature come from? I am not asking about the memory Simonides is said to have possessed, or Theodectes, or Cineas, the ambassador Pyrrhus sent to our senate, or in recent times Charmadas, or Metrodorus of Scepsis, who died only lately, or our own Hortensius. I am talking about ordinary human memory — and above all the memory of people immersed in some higher study or art. How large their minds must be is hard even to estimate: they remember so much.
Where is this speech heading? Toward understanding, I think, what that power is and where it comes from. It certainly does not belong to the heart, or to the blood, or the brain, or the atoms. Whether it is breath or fire, I do not know — and unlike those philosophers, I am not ashamed to admit ignorance where I am ignorant. But this much, if I could swear to anything else so obscure, I would swear: whether the soul is breath or fire, it is divine. Think about it, I beg you. Does it seem possible to you that so vast a power as memory was sown from this earth, or curdled out of this foggy, gloomy atmosphere? If you cannot see what it is, you can still see what kind of thing it is; and if not even that, then you can certainly see how great it is. What follows, then?
Shall we suppose there is some holding-space in the soul — a kind of vessel into which everything we remember gets poured? That is absurd. What bottom could such a soul have? What shape? What capacity could possibly be that large? Or shall we suppose the soul takes impressions like wax, and that memory is the tracks of things stamped into the mind? What kind of tracks could words leave — what tracks could things themselves leave — and what surface could be immense enough to take the print of so much?
And again: what in the world is that power that hunts down what is hidden — the one we call invention and devising? Does it strike you as something curdled together out of this earthly, mortal, perishable nature? Or take the man who first put names to all things — the summit of wisdom, Pythagoras thought. Or the one who gathered scattered human beings together and called them into the fellowship of a shared life; or the one who penned the sounds of the voice, which had seemed infinite, inside a few written letters; or the one who first charted the courses of the wandering stars — their advances, their appointed laws. All great men. And greater still the ones before them, who discovered crops, clothing, houses, an ordered way of living, defenses against wild beasts — the men who tamed and civilized us, so that we flowed on from the necessary crafts to the finer ones. Great delight was won for the ears when the variety and nature of sounds was discovered and tuned; we lifted our eyes to the stars, both the ones fixed in their places and the ones called wanderers — wandering in name, not in fact. And the man whose soul traced their revolutions and all their motions taught us this: that his soul was like the soul of the one who had built those stars in the sky.
For when Archimedes bound the motions of the moon, the sun, and the five wandering stars into a sphere, he accomplished the very thing that Plato's god accomplishes in the Timaeus when he builds the world: one turning governed motions utterly unlike in slowness and in speed. And if that cannot happen in this universe of ours without a god, then not even in his sphere could Archimedes have imitated those same motions without divine genius.
For my part, I do not think even the more familiar, more brightly lit arts are empty of divine power. I cannot believe a poet pours out grave, full song without some heavenly quickening of the mind, or that eloquence flows rich in ringing words and fertile thoughts without some force greater than ourselves. And philosophy, the mother of all the arts — what is she but, as Plato says, a gift of the gods, or, as I put it, their invention? She was the one who first taught us the worship of the gods, then the justice that binds mankind, grounded in the fellowship of the human race, and then modesty and greatness of spirit. She was the one who drove the fog from the soul, as from the eyes, so that we could see everything above and below — the first things, the last things, and everything between.
Altogether, a power that accomplishes so many things, and such great ones, seems to me divine. What is memory of facts and words? What, for that matter, is invention? Surely something greater than which nothing can be conceived even in a god. For I do not imagine the gods spend their happiness on ambrosia and nectar, with Juventas, the goddess of youth, pouring their cups; and I don't listen to Homer when he says Ganymede was carried off by the gods for his beauty, to serve Jupiter his wine — hardly a just cause for doing Laomedon so great a wrong. Homer was making all that up, transferring what is human onto the gods. I would rather he had transferred what is divine onto us. And what is divine? To be full of life, to know, to discover, to remember. So the soul, as I keep saying, is divine — or, as Euripides dares to say, a god. And indeed, if god is either breath or fire, then the soul of man is the same. For just as that celestial nature is free of earth and of moisture, so the human soul has no share of either; and if instead there is some fifth nature, first introduced by Aristotle, then it belongs alike to gods and to souls. Following this view, I put it in these very words in my Consolation:
"Nowhere on earth can the origin of souls be found. For there is nothing in souls that is mixed or compounded, nothing that seems born or fashioned out of earth — nothing even moist, or airy, or fiery. In natures of that kind there is nothing that carries the power of memory, of mind, of thought — nothing that holds on to the past, foresees the future, and can take in the present. Those powers alone are divine, and no source will ever be found from which they could come to a human being except god. The soul's nature and power, then, is something singular, set apart from these familiar, well-known natures. So whatever it is that feels, that knows, that lives, that thrives, is celestial and divine — and for that very reason it must be eternal. Indeed god himself, as we understand him, can be understood in no other way than as a mind unbound and free, separated from all mortal compounding, aware of everything and moving everything, itself endowed with everlasting motion. Of this kind, and of this same nature, is the human mind."
Where, then, is this mind of yours, and what is it like? Well — where is yours, and what is it like? Can you say? If I don't possess everything I might wish for understanding, will you forbid me even to use what I do possess? The soul does not have strength enough to see itself; but like the eye, the soul, without seeing itself, discerns other things. It does not see — the least important point — its own shape (though perhaps it does even that; but let it pass). What it certainly sees is its force, its shrewdness, its memory, its motion, its speed. These are great; these are divine; these are everlasting. What face it has, or where it lives, we need not even ask.
Think what we see when we look up: first the beauty and brilliance of the sky; then the speed of its turning, greater than we can even conceive; then the alternation of days and nights, and the fourfold change of the seasons, fitted to ripen the crops and temper our bodies; and the sun, ruler and leader of all of it; and the moon, whose waxing and waning light marks and signals the days like a calendar; and, on that same sphere divided into twelve parts, the five planets holding their courses with perfect constancy though their motions differ among themselves; and the night sky adorned on every side with stars; and the globe of the earth standing up out of the sea, fixed at the center of the whole universe, inhabited and cultivated in two widely separated zones — one of them ours,
set beneath the pole, toward the seven stars, from which the north wind's shuddering shriek drives on the freezing snows,
the other the southern one, unknown to us, which the Greeks call the antichthon, the opposite earth —
while the remaining regions lie uncultivated, either stiff with cold or scorched with heat. But here where we live, in its season, without fail,
the sky grows bright, the trees put on their leaves, the gladdening vines grow young with swelling shoots, the branches bow beneath their wealth of fruit, the grainfields pour out harvest, all things flower, the springs well up, the meadows dress in grass —
and then the multitude of animals, some for food, some to work the fields, some for carrying, some to clothe our bodies; and man himself, made as if on purpose to contemplate the sky and worship the gods; and all the fields and seas obedient to man's use —
when we take in all this and countless things besides, can we doubt that someone presides over it — a maker, if these things were born, as Plato thinks, or, if they have existed forever, as Aristotle prefers, a governor of so vast a work and so vast a charge? It is the same with the mind of man. You cannot see it, just as you cannot see god; but as you recognize god from his works, so from memory, from invention, from quickness of motion, from all the beauty of virtue, recognize the divine power of the mind. Where is it located, then? In the head, I believe, and I can offer my reasons for believing so. But the soul's address can wait for another time. It is certainly in you. What is its nature? Its own, I think — peculiar to itself. But suppose it is fire; suppose it is breath: nothing to the question before us. Only see this: just as you know god while knowing nothing of his place or his appearance, so your own soul ought to be known to you, even if you know neither its place nor its form.
And about the soul we cannot doubt — unless we are absolute lead-heads in natural science — that there is nothing in souls mixed in, nothing compounded, nothing coupled, nothing welded together, nothing double. And if that is so, it certainly cannot be split, or divided, or torn apart, or pulled asunder — and therefore it cannot perish. For perishing is a kind of departure and separation and divorce of parts that, before the perishing, were held together in some sort of union. It was because reasons like these persuaded him that Socrates sought no advocate at his trial for his life and never once groveled before his judges. He carried a free defiance, drawn from greatness of spirit, not from arrogance. On the last day of his life he argued this very question at length; a few days earlier, when he could easily have been slipped out of prison, he refused; and at the end, with that death-bearing cup all but in his hand, he spoke like a man who was not being pushed toward death but climbing up into heaven.
For that is what he believed, and that is how he argued it: there are two roads, two different courses for souls as they leave the body. Those who had fouled themselves with the vices common to mankind, who had given themselves over entirely to their lusts and, blinded by them, had stained themselves with private vice and disgrace, or, by violence against their country, had taken on crimes past all atoning — for these there is a byway, walled off from the company of the gods. But those who had kept themselves upright and pure, who had taken the least possible contagion from the body and had always drawn themselves away from it, and who, while in human bodies, had imitated the life of the gods — for these the road back to the beings they came from lies open and easy.
And so he recalls the swans, sacred to Apollo — not without reason, but because they seem to hold from him the gift of prophecy: foreseeing what good there is in death, they die with song and with pleasure. All good and learned men, he says, should do the same. And no one could doubt any of this — except that the same thing happens to us, when we think hard about the soul, that often happens to people who stare straight at the setting sun: they lose their sight altogether. So the mind's eye, gazing at itself, sometimes goes dim, and we lose our grip on the contemplation. And so our argument sails on — doubting, peering about, hesitating, wary of many dangers — like a raft on a boundless sea.
But all this is old, and Greek. Cato, though, left life in such a way that he rejoiced at having found a cause for dying. For the god who rules within us forbids us to depart from here without his order; but when god himself gives a just cause — as once to Socrates, as lately to Cato, as often to many — then, I swear it, the wise man will go gladly out of this darkness into that light. And yet he will not break the chains of his prison — the laws forbid it — but will go out as one summoned and released by god, as if by a magistrate or some other lawful power. For as Socrates himself says, the whole life of a philosopher is a preparation for death.
For what else are we doing when we call the soul away from pleasure — which is to say, from the body; when we call it away from private property, which is the body's servant and handmaid; away from public life; away from business of every kind — what, I ask, are we doing then, except calling the soul into its own company, pressing it to be with itself, and leading it as far away from the body as we can? And to separate the soul from the body — is that anything else but learning how to die? So let us rehearse this, believe me; let us uncouple ourselves from our bodies — that is, let us grow accustomed to dying. While we remain on earth, this will be something like that heavenly life; and when we are carried there, released from these chains, the soul's journey will be less slowed. For souls that have lived forever in the body's shackles move haltingly even once they are freed, like men who have worn irons for many years. When we have arrived there — then, at last, we will live. For this life is really death, and I could raise a lament over it, if I chose.
"You have lamented it quite enough in your Consolation," he said. "When I read that book, I want nothing so much as to leave all this behind — and after what I have just heard, far more."
"The time will come," I said, "and quickly, whether you hang back or hurry — for time flies. But death is so far from being the evil it lately seemed to you that I begin to suspect that for a human being nothing else is so certainly not an evil — indeed, that nothing else is so surely a good — if it is true that we are to become gods ourselves, or companions of gods. Still, what does that matter? There are people on hand who won't accept any of it. But I will never release you from this conversation while any argument is left by which death could seem to you an evil."
"How could it, after what I have learned?"
"You ask how it could? Whole squadrons of objectors are marching against us — and not only Epicureans, whom I for my part do not despise, though somehow every serious scholar scorns them. My own darling Dicaearchus has argued most fiercely of all against this immortality. He wrote three books, called the Lesbiacs because the conversation is set at Mytilene, in which he sets out to prove that souls are mortal. The Stoics, for their part, grant us a lease on existence, the way you might to crows: souls last a long while, they say — forever, they deny. Wouldn't you like to hear, then, why even if that were true, death still would not be among the evils?"
"As you please — but no one is going to drive me off immortality."
"I applaud that — though we shouldn't be too confident about anything. Some sharp little piece of logic often shakes us; we waver and change our minds even on clearer matters than this one, and in this there is real obscurity. So if that should happen, let us be armed for it."
"By all means — but I will see to it that it doesn't happen."
"Then is there any reason we shouldn't dismiss our friends the Stoics? I mean the ones who say souls persist after they leave the body, but not forever."
"Dismiss them indeed — men who take on the hardest point in the whole case, that a soul can exist with no body at all, and then refuse the point that is not only easy to believe but actually follows from what they've granted: that if it can last a long age, it does not perish at all."
"A fair rebuke," I said, "and that is exactly how it stands." And I went on. Should we then believe Panaetius where he parts company with his own Plato? Everywhere he calls Plato divine, the wisest, the holiest of men, the Homer of philosophers — and yet this one opinion of his, the immortality of souls, he will not accept. He holds — what no one denies — that whatever is born perishes; and that souls are born, he says, is proved by the resemblance of children to their parents, a likeness that shows in their temperaments and not only in their bodies. He offers a second argument too: nothing feels pain that cannot also fall sick; whatever can fall into disease will also perish; souls feel pain; therefore souls perish.
These arguments can be answered. They are the arguments of a man who fails to see that when we speak of the eternity of souls, we are speaking of the mind, which is forever free of any turbulent motion — not of those parts where grief, anger, and lust do their work, parts which the very man he is arguing against holds to be fenced off and separated from the mind. As for resemblance, it shows more clearly in beasts, whose souls have no share of reason; in human beings the likeness lies rather in the build of the body — and it matters a great deal what sort of body a soul is housed in. Many things arise from the body that sharpen the mind, and many that blunt it. Aristotle, indeed, says that all men of genius are melancholics — which lets me feel no great regret at being on the slow side. He lists many cases, and, as though it were settled fact, offers a theory of why it happens. But if things generated in the body have that much power over the cast of the mind — and those are the things, whatever they are, that produce the resemblance — then resemblance proves nothing about souls being born. I say nothing of the cases of unlikeness.
I wish Panaetius could be here — he lived in the household of Africanus. I would ask him: which of his family did the grand-nephew of Africanus take after? In face, perhaps his father; in his way of life he was so like every degenerate in Rome that he was easily the worst of them all. And whom did the grandson of Publius Crassus — that wise, eloquent, preeminent man — take after? And the grandsons and sons of so many other famous men, whom there is no point in naming? But what are we doing? Have we forgotten that our plan was, once we had said enough about eternity, to show that even if souls do perish, there is still nothing evil in death?
"I remembered it perfectly well," he said, "but while you were talking about eternity, I was glad to let you wander from the plan."
"I see you are looking high," I said, "and want to move to heaven. I have hopes that will be our lot. But suppose, as those objectors insist, that souls do not survive after death."
"If that is so, I see we are robbed of the hope of a happier life."
"But what evil does that opinion actually bring? Suppose the soul perishes just like the body: is there any pain, or any sensation at all, in the body after death? No one claims that — though Epicurus accuses Democritus of it, the Democriteans deny it. Then no sensation remains in the soul either, for the soul is nowhere. Where, then, is the evil, since there is no third thing? Is it that the soul's parting from the body doesn't happen without pain? Even if I believed that, how small a thing it is! But I think it is false: the parting mostly happens without any sensation, sometimes even with pleasure; and the whole affair, whatever it amounts to, is slight — for it takes an instant."
"What torments us — no, tortures us — is the departure from all the good things of life." So runs the objection. But look whether it wouldn't be truer to say "from the evils." Why should I now spend time mourning over human life? I could do it truly and justly. But when my whole point is that no one is miserable after death, why make life more miserable still by lamenting it? I did that in the book where I consoled myself as best I could. Death, then, if it is truth we are after, draws us away from evils, not from goods. In fact Hegesias the Cyrenaic argued this so fluently that King Ptolemy, the story goes, barred him from lecturing on it in the schools, because many who heard him went and took their own lives.
There is an epigram of Callimachus on Theombrotus of Ambracia, who, he says, though nothing bad had happened to him, threw himself from the city wall into the sea after reading a book of Plato's. And that Hegesias I mentioned wrote a book called the Apokarteron — the man who starves himself — in which a man in the act of leaving life through hunger is called back by his friends, and answers them by cataloguing, one by one, the discomforts of human life. I could do the same — though I would not go as far as he does, since he thinks living profits no one at all. Others aside: does it still profit me? Stripped of the consolations of family and the honors of public life alike — surely, had I died sooner, death would have carried me away from evils, not from goods.
So then, take someone who has no evil in his life, who has never taken a wound from fortune. The great Metellus, with his four sons risen to high office; or Priam with his fifty, seventeen of them born of his lawful wife. Fortune held the same power over both men but used it only on one. Metellus was laid on his funeral pyre by a whole crowd of sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters; Priam, stripped of all that offspring, fell by an enemy's hand after fleeing to the altar. Had he died while his sons still lived and his kingdom stood whole,
with all his barbarian wealth about him, under carved and paneled ceilings,
would he have been leaving goods behind, or evils? At the time, surely, it would have seemed goods. Yet certainly it would have gone better for him, and we would never have had that tearful song:
All this I saw go up in flame, and Priam's life torn out by force, and Jove's own altar fouled with blood.
As if anything better could have happened to him, by that point, than such an end! But had he fallen earlier, he would have escaped the whole catastrophe; as it was, dying when he did, he at least lost all sense of his miseries.
Our friend Pompeius had it a little better. When he lay gravely ill at Naples and then recovered, the Neapolitans put garlands on their heads; so, naturally, did the people of Puteoli; town after town sent public congratulations. A silly business, and rather Greek — but still a mark of good fortune. Now suppose he had died then: would he have departed from good things or from evils? Certainly from miseries. He would not have gone to war with his father-in-law; he would not have taken up arms unprepared; he would not have abandoned his house, or fled from Italy; he would not, with his army lost, have fallen defenseless upon the swords and hands of slaves; his children would not have been left to weep, nor his whole fortune passed into the hands of the victors. If he had met death at that moment, he would have died at the very peak of his fortunes; by the extension of his life, how many calamities, how great, how past believing, did he drain to the bottom! These things death lets us escape — for even if they never happen, they can happen; but men never imagine such things can happen to them. Every man hopes for the luck of Metellus — as if the fortunate outnumbered the unfortunate, or anything in human affairs were certain, or hoping were wiser than fearing.
But let us grant even this: that death robs men of good things. Does it follow that the dead therefore lack the comforts of life, and that this is misery? That is certainly what they are forced to say. But can someone who does not exist lack anything? "Lack" is a sad word in itself, because underneath it lies this: he had, and now he has not; he misses it, looks for it, feels the want of it. Those, I suppose, are the troubles of a man who lacks: he lacks eyes — blindness is hateful; he lacks children — bereavement. That holds for the living. But among the dead, no one lacks the comforts of life — no one lacks life itself. I am speaking of the dead, who do not exist. We, who do exist — do we lack horns, or wings? Would anyone say so? Certainly not. Why? Because when you do not have something that neither custom nor nature has fitted you for, you do not lack it — even if you are perfectly aware that you don't have it.
This point must be pressed again and again, once that first one stands firm which, if souls are mortal, no one can doubt: that the destruction in death is so total that not even the faintest suspicion of sensation remains. With that properly planted and fixed, we must then pin down what "lacking" means, so that no error is left hiding in the word. To lack means this: to be without what you would want to have. Wanting is built into lacking — except when the word is used in quite another sense, as when we say a man "lacks" a fever. For "lack" is also used in a different way, when you do not have something and are aware you do not have it, but bear its absence easily. In death, then, "lacking" has no place — for lacking would be something to grieve over. What people say is "he lacks a good," and that, they say, is an evil. But not even a living man lacks a good unless he feels the need of it. Still, of a living man you can at least understand the phrase "lacking a kingdom" — though it can't be said of you with any precision; it could have been said of Tarquinius, once he had been driven from his throne. Of a dead man it cannot even be understood. To lack belongs to someone who feels; there is no feeling in a dead man; therefore not even lacking is in a dead man.
And yet what need is there to philosophize about this at all, when we can see the matter hardly needs philosophy? How many times have not only our generals but whole armies charged straight at certain death! If death were something to fear, Lucius Brutus would not have fallen in battle holding out of the country the tyrant he himself had expelled; the elder Decius would not have thrown himself on the enemy's weapons fighting the Latins, nor his son fighting the Etruscans, nor his grandson fighting Pyrrhus; Spain would not have seen the Scipios fall for their country in a single war, nor Cannae seen Paulus and Geminus, nor Venusia Marcellus, nor Litana Albinus, nor Lucania Gracchus. Is any one of them miserable today? They were not miserable even then, after the last breath — for no one can be miserable once sensation has been destroyed.
"But that very thing is hateful — to be without sensation." Hateful, if it meant lacking. But since it is plain there can be nothing at all in one who does not himself exist, what can be hateful in one who neither lacks nor feels? We have said this too often, perhaps — but only because here lies the whole of the soul's cringing before the fear of death. For whoever sees clearly — and it is clearer than daylight — that when soul and body have been destroyed, the whole living creature blotted out, its ruin total, the animal that once was has become nothing, will see just as plainly that there is no difference between a hippocentaur, which never existed, and King Agamemnon — and that Marcus Camillus cares no more about this civil war of ours than I, while he was alive, cared about the capture of Rome. Why then should Camillus have grieved at the thought of these events some three hundred and fifty years after his time, and why should I grieve at the thought that some nation will seize our city ten thousand years from now? Because our love of country is so great that we measure it not by our own sensation but by her own survival.
And so death — which hangs over us daily through countless accidents, and which, life being as short as it is, can never be far away — does not deter the wise man from providing for his country and his own people for all time to come. He counts posterity, which he will never sense, as his own concern. And so even a man who judges the soul mortal may build works for eternity — not out of hunger for glory, which he will never feel, but out of virtue, which glory follows of necessity, even when you are not seeking it. Nature, in truth, stands like this: just as our birth brought us the beginning of all things, so death brings the end; and as nothing touched us before birth, so nothing will touch us after death. Where can the evil be in that, since death concerns neither the living nor the dead?
The dead do not exist; the living it will not reach. Those who make death out to be a light thing compare it to sleep — as if anyone would choose to live ninety years on the condition that at sixty he sleep through the rest! Not even his own family would want that for him, let alone the man himself. Endymion — if we care to listen to fables — fell asleep once upon a time on Latmus, a mountain in Caria, and I don't believe he has woken up yet. Do you suppose he cares when the Moon is in eclipse — the Moon who is said to have lulled him to sleep so that she might kiss him as he slept? What should he care about, when he cannot even feel? There you have it: sleep, the image of death, and you put it on every day. Can you still doubt that there is no sensation in death, when you see there is none in its very likeness?
So let us sweep away this nonsense, fit for old wives, that it is miserable to die before your time. Before what time, exactly? Nature's? But nature only lent you life, the way one lends money — with no repayment date fixed in advance. What complaint do you have, then, if she calls in the loan when she pleases? Those were the terms on which you took it. The same people who talk this way agree that if a small child dies, the loss must be borne calmly, and if an infant dies in the cradle, there should be no complaint at all. Yet in that case nature demanded back what she gave more harshly than in any other. "The infant hadn't yet tasted the sweetness of life," they say, "while the grown man was already hoping for great things and had begun to enjoy them." But in everything else we think it better to get some part than none at all — why should life be different? Though Callimachus put it well enough when he said that Priam wept far more often than Troilus, who died young. Meanwhile people praise the good fortune of those who die in old age.
Why? Because, I suppose, no one's life could have been any sweeter had it run longer — since nothing, surely, is sweeter to a man than practical wisdom, and old age certainly brings him that, whatever else it strips away. But what age is really long? What, for a human being, is long at all? Isn't it as the poet says —
Chasing hard behind them, now boys, now young men in mid-stride, old age has caught them when they least expected it.
But because we have nothing beyond old age, we call it long. All these things get called long or short according to the share each of us happens to be given. Aristotle says that near the river Hypanis, which flows into the Black Sea from the European side, tiny creatures are born that live a single day. One of them that dies at the eighth hour has died at a ripe old age; one that dies at sunset is positively decrepit — all the more so if it happens on midsummer's day, when the daylight runs longest. Set our longest human life against eternity, and we will be found living in very nearly the same brevity as those little creatures.
So let us hold all these follies in contempt — what softer name could I give to such shallowness? — and let us place the whole force of living well in strength and greatness of spirit, in contempt and disdain for everything merely human, and in every virtue. As things stand, we make ourselves soft with the tenderest imaginings, so that if death arrives before we have collected everything the Chaldean fortune-tellers promised us, we feel robbed of some tremendous goods — cheated, and left stranded.
But if hoping and craving keep our souls hanging in suspense, tormented and strangled with worry — immortal gods! how pleasant the journey must be that ends with no care remaining and no anxiety ahead! How Theramenes delights me! What a lofty spirit! We weep when we read his story, yes, but there is nothing pitiful in the way that famous man dies. Thrown into prison by order of the Thirty Tyrants, he drank down the poison like a thirsty man and then flung the last of it from the cup so that it rang as it splashed — and at the sound he smiled and said, "Here's to the lovely Critias," the man who had been the most vicious of his enemies. The Greeks, at their banquets, customarily name the person to whom they are about to pass the cup. That remarkable man was joking with his last breath, the death already gathered in his chest — and for the man to whom he drank that poisoned toast he prophesied, truly, a death that followed soon after.
Who would praise such perfect calm of a very great soul in the very act of dying, if he judged death an evil? A few years later Socrates enters that same prison and that same cup, condemned by a crime of his judges as great as the tyrants' crime against Theramenes. And what is the speech Plato gives him before his judges, after the sentence of death had already been passed? "I have great hope, gentlemen of the jury," he says, "that being sent to death is the best thing that could happen to me. For one of two things must be true: either death takes away all sensation entirely, or it is a migration from this place to some other. So if sensation is snuffed out, and death is like the kind of sleep that sometimes brings the most perfect rest, without even the visions of dreams — good gods, what a gain it is to die! How many days can you find that are better than a night like that? And if the whole endless stretch of time to come is like it, who is happier than I am?
"But if what people say is true — that death is a migration to the shores where those who have departed this life now dwell — then that is happier by far. To have escaped the men who insist on being counted as judges, and to come before the ones who genuinely deserve the name — Minos, Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, Triptolemus — and to meet those who lived justly and kept faith: does that strike you as a shabby sort of journey? And to be allowed to talk with Orpheus and Musaeus, with Homer and Hesiod — what price would you put on that? For my part, I would gladly die many times over, if such a thing could be done, to see what I am describing. What delight I would take in meeting Palamedes, and Ajax, and the others betrayed by unjust verdicts! I would test the wisdom of the great king who led his mighty armies to Troy, and the shrewdness of Ulysses and of Sisyphus — and I would not be condemned to death for asking my questions there, the way I was condemned for asking them here. And you too, gentlemen of the jury — you who voted to acquit me — do not be afraid of death.
"For nothing bad can happen to a good man, living or dead, and the gods never lose sight of his affairs. What has happened to me did not happen by chance. And I hold no grudge against the men who accused me or the men who condemned me — except for this: that they believed they were doing me harm." And so he went on, in that vein. But nothing is finer than the ending. "Now it is time," he says, "to go from here — I, to die; you, to go on living. Which of the two is better, the immortal gods know. Whether any human being knows it, I doubt." I would rather have that man's spirit than the fortunes of every one of the men who sat in judgment on him. And yet the very thing he says no one but the gods knows — which is better — he does know himself, for he had stated it earlier. But he holds to that rule of his — affirm nothing — right to the very end.
As for us, let us hold to this: nothing that nature has given to everyone can be an evil; and let us understand that if death is an evil, it is an everlasting evil. For death is supposed to be the end of a miserable life — but if death itself is misery, then there can be no end at all. But why do I keep citing Socrates and Theramenes, men towering in the glory of virtue and wisdom, when a certain Spartan, whose name has not even come down to us, held death in such contempt that when he was led off to execution, condemned by the ephors, Sparta's magistrates, he wore a bright and cheerful face — and when one of his enemies asked him, "Do you despise the laws of Lycurgus?" he answered, "On the contrary, I am deeply grateful to the man. He set my fine at a price I can pay without a loan — without borrowing from one man to pay another." There was a man worthy of Sparta! Indeed, a spirit that great almost persuades me he was condemned an innocent man. Our own state has produced countless men like him.
But why should I name commanders and leading men, when Cato writes that whole legions marched out, eagerly, again and again, to ground they never expected to return from? With that same spirit the Spartans fell at Thermopylae, for whom Simonides wrote:
Tell them in Sparta, stranger: you saw us lying here, still obedient to our country's sacred laws.
And what does their commander Leonidas say? "Forward with brave hearts, Spartans. Tonight, perhaps, we dine among the dead." It was a hardy nation, as long as the laws of Lycurgus held their force. One of them, when a Persian enemy boasted in a parley, "You will not see the sun for the cloud of our javelins and arrows," replied, "Then we will fight in the shade."
I have been speaking of the men — but what of the Spartan woman? She had sent her son into battle, and when she heard he had been killed, she said, "That is why I bore him: so there would be a man who would not hesitate to die for his country." Very well — the Spartans were tough and hardened; the discipline of a state carries great force. But what about Theodorus of Cyrene, a philosopher of real standing — doesn't he earn our admiration? When King Lysimachus threatened him with crucifixion, he said, "Save those horrors, please, for your courtiers in purple. To Theodorus it makes no difference whether he rots above ground or under it." That saying of his reminds me that something ought to be said about burial and funeral customs — not a difficult subject, especially in light of what was said a little while ago about the dead feeling nothing. What Socrates thought about it appears in the book in which he dies — the book we have already discussed at such length.
He had been arguing about the immortality of souls, and the hour of his death was already pressing, when Crito asked him how he wished to be buried. "My friends," he said, "I have wasted a great deal of effort. I have failed to persuade our Crito that I shall fly away from here and leave nothing of myself behind. Still, Crito — if you can catch me, if you get hold of me anywhere, bury me however you think best. But believe me: not one of you will catch me once I have left this place." Beautifully done — he humored his friend, and at the same time showed that about the whole business he cared nothing at all.
Diogenes was harsher. He held the same view, but as a Cynic he put it more roughly: he ordered his body to be thrown out unburied. His friends asked, "What — for the birds and the wild beasts?" "Not at all," he said. "Set a stick beside me so I can drive them off." "How will you manage that? You won't feel anything." "Then what harm does it do me to be torn by wild animals, if I feel nothing?" Anaxagoras put it splendidly too. He lay dying at Lampsacus, and his friends asked whether, if anything should happen, he wanted to be carried home to Clazomenae. "No need," he said. "From anywhere at all, the road to the underworld is the same length." About the whole question of burial, one thing must be held firm: it concerns the body, whether the soul has perished or lives on. And in the body, once the soul has been extinguished or has slipped free, it is perfectly plain that no sensation remains.
But the world is full of errors on this point. Achilles drags Hector tied behind his chariot; he thinks, I suppose, that Hector is being torn and feels it. So he is taking his revenge — as he imagines. And Hecuba mourns it as the bitterest of wrongs:
I saw — what agony it cost me to see — Hector dragged behind the four-horse car.
What Hector? And how long will he be Hector? Accius does better, and his Achilles is, for once, wise:
No — it was a body I returned to Priam; Hector I took away.
So it was not Hector you dragged, but a body that had once been Hector's.
Now another figure rises up out of the earth, one who will not let his mother sleep:
Mother, I call on you — you who soothe your cares in the hush of sleep and take no pity on me. Rise, and bury your son!
When lines like these are sung to slow and tearful measures that fill whole theaters with sorrow, it is hard not to judge the unburied miserable. "Before the wild beasts and the birds —" He is afraid he will have less use of his limbs if they are mangled; if they are burned, he has no such worry.
Do not leave my half-eaten remains, the bones stripped bare, smeared with gore, to be dragged in shame across the ground —
I fail to see what he is afraid of, when he can pour out such well-turned lines to the pipe. So we must hold to this: nothing is to be cared about after death — though plenty of men take revenge even on enemies already dead. In Ennius, Thyestes calls down curses in truly splendid verses, praying first that Atreus may die in a shipwreck. Harsh, certainly — that kind of death is not free of terrible sensation. But then comes the empty part:
Himself pinned high on the jagged rocks, ripped open, hanging by his side, splattering the stones with filth, with gore and black blood —
The rocks themselves will be no freer of all feeling than that man "hanging by his side," for whom Thyestes thinks he is wishing torture. Torments that would be hard if he could feel them are nothing at all without sensation. And then this, which is utterly empty:
And let him find no tomb to take him in, no harbor for the body, where, human life laid down at last, his corpse might rest from its miseries.
You see how deep in error all this runs: he thinks the body has its harbor, and that the dead man rests in his grave. The fault is largely Pelops's, for never educating his son — never teaching him how far anything actually deserves our care.
But why linger over the opinions of individuals, when we can survey the varied errors of whole nations? The Egyptians embalm their dead and keep them at home. The Persians even coat them with wax before burial, so that the bodies will last as long as possible. It is the custom of the Magi, the Persian priestly clan, not to bury their dead unless the body has first been torn by wild animals. In Hyrcania the common people keep dogs at public expense, and the nobles keep their own — and it is a distinguished breed of dog, as we know — but the point is that each man, according to his means, provides the animals that will tear his body, and there they consider that the finest form of burial. Chrysippus, curious about every corner of history, collects a great many other customs of this kind, but some of them are so hideous that language shrinks back from them in disgust. So the whole subject is one to despise where we ourselves are concerned, though not to neglect where our own people are concerned — so long as we, the living, understand that the bodies of the dead feel nothing.
How much should be granted to custom and to public opinion — let the living see to that, but let them understand that none of it touches the dead. Death is met with the calmest spirit of all when a life at its setting can console itself with its own praises. No one has lived too short a life who has fully discharged the work of perfect virtue. For me, death would have been timely many times over. How I wish I could have met it! There was nothing left for me to gain; the duties of life stood complete; only the battles with fortune remained. So if reason alone cannot bring us to hold death of no account, then let the life we have already lived bring us there — let it show that we have lived enough, and more than enough. For though sensation is gone, the dead are still not without the goods that are properly and truly theirs — the praise and the glory they earned — even if they cannot feel them. Glory may contain nothing in itself that should make us chase it; but it follows virtue like a shadow.
As for the crowd's judgment about good men — on the rare occasions when it is sound, it deserves praise more than it makes those men happy. Still, however this may be taken, I cannot say that Lycurgus and Solon lack glory for their laws and their civic order, or Themistocles and Epaminondas for their valor in war. Neptune will drown Salamis itself before he drowns the memory of the trophy raised at Salamis, and Leuctra will vanish from Boeotia before the glory of the battle fought there. Slower still will fame be to desert Curius, Fabricius, Calatinus, the two Scipios, the two Africani, Maximus, Marcellus, Paulus, Cato, Laelius, and countless others. The man who has caught some likeness of them — measuring it not by popular fame but by the genuine praise of good men — will, if it comes to that, walk toward death with a confident step; and in death, as we have established, lies either the highest good or no evil at all. Such a man will even want to die while his fortunes are at their height; for no further piling up of goods can be as sweet as their draining away is bitter.
That seems to be the meaning behind the famous Spartan's remark. Diagoras of Rhodes, a celebrated Olympic champion, had just watched two of his own sons win at Olympia on a single day, when the Spartan came up to the old man, congratulated him, and said: "Die now, Diagoras — you are not going to climb up into heaven." The Greeks count such things great — too great, perhaps; or rather, they did count them so then. And the man who said this to Diagoras, reckoning it an enormous thing for one house to produce three Olympic champions, judged that lingering any longer in life, exposed to fortune's throws, could do the old man no good. Now, as for you: I had already answered you well enough, it seemed to me, in a few words — you had conceded that the dead are in no evil. But I pressed on and said more, for this reason: in loss and mourning, this is the greatest consolation there is. Grief that is our own, borne on our own account, we ought to bear with moderation, so that we do not seem to love ourselves too much. What tortures us with unbearable pain is the suspicion that those we have lost still have some feeling, amid the miseries people commonly imagine for them. I wanted to tear that opinion out of myself by the roots — and that is perhaps why I went on so long.
"Too long — you?" he said. "Not for me. The first part of your speech made me want to die; the second left me sometimes not unwilling, sometimes simply untroubled. And the whole of it has certainly accomplished this much: I no longer count death among evils."
"Then do we need the orators' epilogue too — the grand closing appeal?" I asked. "Or are we abandoning that art for good?"
"Don't you abandon it — you have always dressed it in honor, and rightly so; though to tell the truth, it was the art that dressed you. But what is this epilogue? I'm eager to hear it, whatever it is."
In the schools, I told him, they regularly bring forward the judgments of the immortal gods concerning death — not inventions of their own, but resting on the authority of Herodotus and many others. First they celebrate Cleobis and Biton, the sons of the priestess of Argos. The story is well known. Sacred law required her to be drawn in a chariot to a fixed annual sacrifice at a temple a good distance from the town, and the animals that were to pull her were delayed. So the two young men I have just named stripped off their clothes, rubbed their bodies with oil, and stepped into the yoke themselves. And so the priestess arrived at the temple, her chariot drawn by her own sons; and there, it is said, she prayed to the goddess to give them, as a reward for their devotion, the greatest gift a god can give a human being. The young men feasted with their mother, lay down to sleep — and in the morning were found dead.
Trophonius and Agamedes are said to have made a similar prayer. When they had finished building Apollo's temple at Delphi, they worshipped the god and asked for no small wage for their work and toil — nothing specific, only whatever was best for a man. Apollo indicated that he would grant it on the third day from then; and when that day dawned, they were found dead. The god had given his verdict, people say — and that god above all others, since to him the rest of the gods have conceded the power of prophecy beyond them all. There is also a little story told about Silenus. Captured by King Midas, he is recorded to have paid this as the price of his release: he taught the king that by far the best thing for a human being is never to be born at all — and the next best, to die as soon as possible.
Euripides uses the same thought in his Cresphontes:
It would be fitting for us to gather the household in mourning whenever someone is born into the light, counting over the many evils of human life; but the man who has ended life's hard labors in death — him his friends should escort out with praise and gladness.
There is something similar in Crantor's Consolation. He tells of a certain Elysius of Terina who, grieving bitterly over the death of his son, came to an oracle of the dead to ask why so great a calamity had struck him — and was handed a tablet with three verses like these:
Ignorant minds — so mortals wander through their lives. Euthynous lies in death by the appointed will of fate. This ending was the better — for him, and for you.
With these authorities and others like them, they argue that the case has been decided by the immortal gods. Alcidamas, an early rhetorician of the very first rank, even wrote a Praise of Death, which consists of a catalogue of humanity's ills. The philosophers' more finely worked arguments escaped him; richness of language did not. As for glorious deaths met for one's country, the rhetoricians regularly hold them up as not only splendid but happy. They reach back to Erechtheus, whose very daughters went eagerly to death for the lives of their fellow citizens. They cite Codrus, who threw himself into the thick of the enemy dressed as a servant, so that his royal robes would not give him away — because an oracle had declared that if the king were killed, Athens would be victorious. Menoeceus is not passed over, who likewise, when an oracle had been published, poured out his blood for his country. Iphigenia, at Aulis, orders herself led to the sacrifice, so that her blood may draw out the blood of her enemies. From there they come down to more recent cases: Harmodius and Aristogiton are on everyone's lips; the memory of Leonidas the Spartan and Epaminondas the Theban is still green. Our own Romans they do not know — and it would be a long task to list them, so many are the men who, as we see, found death with glory a thing worth desiring.
And yet, true as all this is, we must still bring great eloquence to bear — must speak as if from a platform above the crowd — to make men begin to wish for death, or at least stop fearing it. For if that final day brings not extinction but a change of place, what could be more desirable? And if instead it destroys us and blots us out altogether, what is better than to fall asleep in the middle of life's labors and, closing our eyes, to be lulled into a sleep that lasts forever? If that is how it is, then Ennius speaks better than Solon. Our own poet says:
Let no one honor me with tears, nor hold my funeral rites with weeping.
But the wise Solon:
Let my death not lack for tears: let me leave to my friends grief, so they mourn aloud at my funeral.
As for us — if it should happen that a god seems to give us notice to depart from this life, let us obey gladly and with thanksgiving, and count ourselves released from prison and loosed from our chains, either to journey home again to a dwelling that is eternal and plainly our own, or to be free of all sensation and all trouble. And if no notice comes, let us still keep such a spirit that the day which others find dreadful we regard as a lucky day for us, and let us count nothing an evil that has been appointed by the immortal gods or by nature, the mother of us all. For it was not at random or by accident that we were sown and created. There is beyond doubt some power that watches over the human race — one that would never have brought forth and nourished a being who, after draining every labor to the dregs, would then fall at death into everlasting evil. Let us think of death instead as a harbor made ready for us, a refuge.
If only we could ride into it under full sail! But if headwinds drive us back, still we must be carried, a little later, to the same place. And can what is necessary for everyone be misery for any one? There you have your epilogue — so you won't think anything was skipped or left behind.
"I have it," he said, "and in fact that epilogue has made me steadier still."
"Good," I said. "But for now let us give something to our health. Tomorrow, and for all the days we are here at my place in Tusculum, let us go on with these discussions — above all the ones that bring relief from grief, from fears, and from cravings. That is the richest fruit of the whole of philosophy."
In Ennius's play, Neoptolemus says he needs to do philosophy — "but only a little; giving myself to it entirely doesn't appeal to me at all." Well, Brutus, I think I need to do philosophy too — what better use can I make of myself, especially now that I have nothing else to do? — but not "only a little," like him. Philosophy is a field where it's hard to know a few things well unless you know most of it, or all of it. You can only choose a few subjects out of the whole spread; and anyone who has genuinely grasped a few will go after the rest with the same appetite.
Still, in a busy life — a soldier's life, as Neoptolemus's was then — even those few things often do a great deal of good and bear real fruit: not as much as the whole of philosophy can yield, but enough to free us, sometimes and in part, from desire, from grief, from fear. Take the discussion I held recently at my villa in Tusculum: out of it seemed to come a genuine contempt for death, and that goes no small way toward freeing the mind from fear. A man who dreads what cannot be avoided has no chance of living with a quiet mind. But the man who does not fear death — not only because dying is inevitable, but because death holds nothing worth shuddering at — has laid in a great store of protection for a happy life.
Not that I don't know how many people will be eager to argue the other side. There was no way to avoid that, short of writing nothing at all. My speeches were aimed at the judgment of the crowd — oratory is a popular art, and the proof of eloquence is the audience's applause — and even so, there were critics who praised nothing except what they were confident they could imitate themselves, who set the limit of good speaking exactly where their own hopes gave out, and who, when they were being buried under an abundance of ideas and words, announced that they preferred lean starvation to richness and plenty. That is where the so-called "Attic" style came from — a style unknown to the very men who claimed to be following it, men who have since gone quiet, all but laughed out of the forum itself —
so if that is what happened to my speeches, what do I imagine will happen now, when the popular backing I once leaned on is no use to me at all? Philosophy is content with a few judges. She deliberately runs from the crowd, and the crowd in turn finds her suspect and hateful — so that anyone who wanted to run down philosophy as a whole could do it to popular applause, and anyone who attacks the particular school I follow can call in heavy reinforcements from all the other philosophers' camps. But I have already answered the detractors of philosophy in general in my Hortensius, and what needed saying on behalf of the Academy I think I laid out carefully enough in the four books of my Academics. And far from wishing that no one would write against me, I want nothing more. Philosophy would never have been held in such honor in Greece itself if it had not stayed vigorous through the contests and quarrels of its most learned men.
So I urge everyone who is able: let us take this glory too away from a Greece that is fading, and carry it into this city, just as our ancestors, by their own effort and industry, carried over every other art worth wanting. The glory of oratory rose from humble beginnings to the very summit — and now, as nature ordains for nearly everything, it is growing old and looks likely to come to nothing before long. Let philosophy, then, be born in Latin letters in our own day; and let us help it grow, and let ourselves be contradicted and refuted without minding it. The people who cannot bear that are the ones bound over and consecrated, so to speak, to fixed and predetermined doctrines — chained so tightly by the demands of consistency that, for consistency's sake, they are forced to defend positions they don't even approve of. We who pursue the probable, and cannot go beyond whatever presents itself as likely, are ready to refute without stubbornness and to be refuted without anger.
And if these studies are carried over to our own people, we won't even need the Greek libraries anymore — where the number of books is endless because the number of authors is: so many writers saying the same things that they have stuffed the world with volumes. The same will happen to us, if crowds come pouring into these studies. But let us rouse up, if we can, the men who have a liberal education and who philosophize with method and order — and with some elegance of argument besides.
For there is a certain breed who like to be called philosophers, and whose Latin books are said to be numerous indeed. I don't look down on them — I've never read them — but since the authors themselves announce that they write with no distinctions, no organization, no elegance, no polish, I skip a kind of reading that offers no pleasure. What the men of that school say and think, nobody with even a modest education fails to know already. So, since they take no trouble over how they say it, I can't see why they should be read by anyone except each other — the people who already agree.
Everyone reads Plato and the other Socratics, and the whole line descended from them — even people who don't accept their views or don't pursue them very eagerly — while hardly anyone besides his own disciples ever picks up Epicurus or Metrodorus. In just the same way, the only people who read these Latin books are the ones who think the doctrines in them are correct. My own view is that anything committed to writing ought to deserve the attention of every educated reader. Even if I can't achieve that myself, I don't think it any less the standard to aim for.
That is why I have always liked the custom of the Peripatetics and the Academy: arguing both sides of every question. Not only because there is no other way to find what is probable in each case, but because it is the finest possible training in speaking. Aristotle used it first, and then those who followed him. Within my own memory, Philo — I heard him often — set aside one hour for teaching the rules of the rhetoricians and another for philosophy. My friends drew me into that custom at Tusculum, and we spent the time we had exactly that way. So after we had given the morning to speaking practice, as we had done the day before, in the afternoon we went down into the Academy — the walk I named for Plato's school. What was discussed there I am setting out not as a summary from memory, but almost word for word, just as it was argued.
So, as we walked, the conversation got underway, opened by something like this. "I can't tell you how much yesterday's discussion delighted me," he said, "or rather, how much it helped me. I know perfectly well I have never clung too hard to life; but even so, a certain fear and pain used to push into my mind whenever I thought that someday this daylight would end and I would lose everything good that life holds. Believe me, I have been freed from that kind of trouble so completely that nothing now seems to me less worth worrying about."
"No wonder at all," I said. "That is what philosophy does: it heals souls, drains off empty anxieties, frees us from cravings, drives away fears. But its power doesn't work the same on everyone; it counts for most when it takes hold of the right nature. 'Fortune favors the brave,' as the old proverb says — but reason favors them far more, using its precepts, you might say, to reinforce the very strength of courage. Nature clearly made you lofty and high-reaching, a man who looks down on merely human concerns, and so a speech against death found easy lodging in a brave spirit. But do you suppose those same arguments carry any weight — outside a very few exceptions — with the very men who invented them, debated them, and wrote them down? How many philosophers can you find whose character, whose settled mind and life, are what reason demands? who treat their doctrine not as a display of learning but as the law of their own life? who obey themselves and follow their own decrees?
"You can see some of them so shallow and boastful that they would have been better off never studying at all; some greedy for money, a few for glory, many enslaved to their lusts — so that their talk is at war, spectacularly, with their life. And that seems to me the most shameful thing there is. If a man who calls himself a grammarian speaks like a barbarian, or a would-be musician sings off-key, the failure is all the uglier because it comes in the one field he claims to know. In the same way, a philosopher who fails in the conduct of life is the uglier failure because he is stumbling in the very duty he sets up to teach: he professes the art of living, and botches the living."
"If that's so," he said, "isn't there a danger that you're decking philosophy out in false glory? What stronger proof that it's useless than that some fully finished philosophers live disgracefully?"
"That is no proof at all. Not every field that is cultivated bears a crop — and Accius's lines are simply false:
Though sound seed fall on poor and meager ground, its own good nature still will make it shine.
"Not so — and in the same way, not every cultivated mind bears fruit. To stay inside the same comparison: as a field, however fertile, cannot be fruitful without cultivation, neither can a mind without teaching — philosophy is the cultivation of the mind. Each of the two is feeble without the other. Philosophy pulls vices out by the roots, prepares the mind to receive seed, and entrusts to it — sows in it, you might say — what will grow up to bear the richest fruit. So let's proceed the way we began. Tell me, if you would: what would you like discussed?"
"Pain seems to me the greatest of all evils," he began.
"Even a greater evil than disgrace?"
"That I don't dare say — and I'm ashamed to be knocked off my position so quickly."
"You would have more to be ashamed of if you had stayed on it. What could be less worthy than for anything to look worse to you than disgrace, outrage, and plain baseness? To escape those, what pain is there that a man shouldn't — I won't just say accept — but go out to meet of his own accord, take on, and welcome?"
"I agree completely. So pain may not be the greatest evil — but it is certainly an evil."
"And do you see how much of pain's terror you have already dropped at one small prompting?"
"I see it plainly. But I'd like to drop more."
"I'll try. But it is a large undertaking, and I need a mind on your side that isn't fighting me."
"You have it. As I did yesterday, I will follow reason wherever she leads."
So I began. First, a word about the weakness of many philosophers — and of many different schools. The first of them in authority and in age, Aristippus, Socrates' own pupil, did not hesitate to call pain the greatest evil. Then Epicurus showed himself docile enough to this soft and womanish doctrine. After him, Hieronymus of Rhodes said that the highest good was freedom from pain — that is how much evil he found in pain. The rest, except for Zeno, Aristo, and Pyrrho, said roughly what you said just now: an evil, yes, but with worse evils beyond it.
So the thing that nature herself and a certain inborn nobility rejected on the spot — your calling pain the greatest evil, a claim you were driven from the moment disgrace was set against it — that is the position philosophy, the teacher of life, has clung to for all these centuries? What duty, what praise, what honor will be worth so much that a man who has convinced himself pain is the greatest evil will accept bodily pain to win it? And what humiliation, what baseness won't he swallow to escape pain, once he has decided pain is the worst thing there is? And who isn't miserable — not only while the worst pains are actually crushing him, if pain really is the greatest evil, but the moment he knows they could come for him? And who is exempt from that? The upshot is that no one at all can be happy.
Metrodorus, it's true, thinks a man perfectly happy if his body is in good condition and he holds a guarantee that it will always stay that way. But who is this man with the guarantee? Epicurus, though, says things that seem to me designed to get a laugh. He declares somewhere that if the wise man is being burned, being tortured — you're waiting, perhaps, for him to say "he will take it, he will bear up, he will not give in"; high praise, by Hercules, and worthy of the very Hercules I just swore by! — but no, that isn't enough for Epicurus, that stern, hardened character. If his wise man is inside the bull of Phalaris — the tyrant's bronze roasting-machine — he will say: "How sweet this is! How little it bothers me!" Sweet, even? Isn't it enough if it's "not bitter"? Even the men who flatly deny that pain is an evil don't usually claim that torture is sweet for anyone. They call it harsh, hard, hateful, contrary to nature — and still not an evil. But this man, who says pain is the only evil and the very worst of all evils, thinks the wise man will call it sweet.
I don't ask you to describe pain in the same words Epicurus uses for pleasure — a man, as you know, devoted to pleasure. By all means let him say the same thing in Phalaris's bull that he would say in his own bed. I don't grant wisdom that much power against pain. Let the wise man be brave in enduring it — that satisfies his duty. That he should positively enjoy it, I don't demand. Because pain is, beyond any question, a grim business: harsh, bitter, an enemy to nature, hard to submit to and hard to bear.
Look at Philoctetes. Him we may forgive for groaning — he had seen Hercules himself on Mount Oeta, howling under the sheer size of his pains. The arrows Hercules had given him were no comfort at all to Philoctetes when
from the viper's bite, the veins deep in his body, steeped through with venom, woke their hideous torments.
And so he screams, begging for help, longing to die:
Oh, who will throw me to the salt waves from the towering crest of this rock? Now, now it devours me — the wound's raw force, the ulcer's fire, is eating out my life.
It seems hard to say that a man forced to scream like that is not in the grip of an evil — and a great one.
But let us watch Hercules himself, broken by pain at the very moment he was reaching for immortality through death itself. What cries Sophocles gives him in the Trachiniae! When Deianira had dressed him in the tunic dyed with the Centaur's blood, and it had fused itself to his flesh, he says:
O things heavy to tell, and harsh to suffer, which I have drained with my body, borne in my soul! Not Juno's terror, never to be appeased, not grim Eurystheus loaded me with evil to match one mad woman, the daughter of Oeneus. She snared me, blind, in this robe of the Furies that clings to my sides, and bites, and tears my flesh, crushes my lungs and drinks away my breath; already it has sucked my blood to nothing. My body, eaten by this horrible ruin, is wasted; bound fast, I am being murdered by a woven plague. No enemy's hand did this; no earth-born army of Giants, no two-formed Centaur's charge ever struck such a blow against my body; no Greek force, no barbarian savagery, no cruel tribe exiled at the ends of the earth — all the lands I crossed, driving out every wildness: I, a man, am killed by a woman's womanly hand. My son! Earn that name truly, toward your father; don't let a mother's claim outweigh a dying man's. Drag her here to me — your loyal hands can bring her. Now I will see which of us you hold dearer.
Go on, my son — dare it. Weep for your father's agony. Take pity. Nations will weep for our miseries. Shame! that I pour from my mouth a girl's wailing — I, whom no one ever saw groan at any evil. My manhood has been made a woman's; it is dying. Come near, son. Stand by me. Look at your father's pitiful body, gutted and torn apart. See it, all of you! And you, sower of the heavens, hurl down on me, I beg, the flash of your lightning! Now — now the churning whirlpools of pain are twisting me; now the fire crawls. O hands, once all-conquering,
O chest, O back, O knotted muscle of these arms! Was it your grip in which the Nemean lion once ground his teeth and gasped his final breath? Did this right hand slaughter the foul serpent and give Lerna peace? Did this hand break the two-bodied band of Centaurs? Did this fell the ravening beast of Erymanthus? Did this drag the three-headed dog, the Hydra's kin, up out of the black country of Tartarus? Did this destroy the dragon of a thousand coils, whose eyes stood guard upon the gold-bearing tree? Many another conquest this hand traveled through, and no man ever stripped a trophy from my glory.
Can we despise pain, when we watch Hercules himself suffering it with so little power to endure?
Now let Aeschylus step forward — not only a poet but a Pythagorean too; that is the tradition we have received. How does his Prometheus bear the pain he takes on for the theft at Lemnos —
From there came fire, dealt out in secret to mortal men; and clever Prometheus stole it, they say, by cunning, and paid the price to Jupiter by supreme doom.
Paying that price, nailed to the Caucasus, he says this:
Race of the Titans, blood-kin of my blood, children of Heaven — look at me, lashed and bound to jagged rock, the way frightened sailors, dreading the night, moor their ship down tight in a howling strait. So Jupiter, Saturn's son, spiked me here, and Jupiter's will enlisted the hands of Mulciber, the fire-god. With cruel craft he drove these wedges through and split my limbs; and pierced by that workmanship, a wretch, I garrison this fortress of the Furies.
And now, each third and fatal day, Jupiter's winged henchman swoops down grimly and rips me open with her hooked talons, carving her savage meal. Stuffed fat and glutted on my rich liver, she pours out a vast scream and, climbing high on the wing, her feathered tail strokes at my blood. And when the gnawed liver has swelled back whole again, greedy she returns to her foul feeding. So I feed this warden of my grim torture, who defiles my living body with misery that has no end. For look: pinned fast in Jupiter's chains, I cannot drive the hideous bird away from my breast.
Robbed of my own defense, I take in these torments, each one an anguish, in love with death, hunting for any end to this evil — but Jupiter's will beats me far back from dying. This ancient, grief-bringing ruin, massed up through hideous centuries, is planted in my body, and out of it fall drops, melted in the sun's blaze, that drip forever on the rocks of Caucasus.
So it seems we can hardly call a man in that condition anything but miserable; and if he is miserable, then pain is an evil.
Here he broke in. "So far, you're pleading my side of the case. But I'll get to that in a moment. Meanwhile — where are those verses from? I don't recognize them."
"I'll tell you, by Hercules — you're right to ask. You see, don't you, that I have time on my hands?"
"What of it?"
"When you were at Athens, I imagine you often sat in at the philosophers' schools."
"Yes — and gladly."
"Then you noticed that even though none of them was exactly a torrent of words, they still mixed verses into their talks."
"Yes — Dionysius the Stoic used a great many."
"Right. But he served them up like dictation — no selection, no elegance. Philo gave true measured lines, well chosen, and set exactly in place. So ever since I fell in love with this old man's declamation of mine, I've been eager to use our own poets — and wherever they have run short, I've translated a good deal from the Greek, so that Latin speech won't lack any ornament in this kind of discussion."
Then I pressed on. But do you see how much harm the poets do? They bring on the bravest men weeping over their misfortunes; they soften our minds; and on top of it they are so sweet that we don't just read them — we learn them by heart. So when the poets are added to bad discipline at home and a life lived in the shade among comforts, they cut virtue's sinews clean through. Plato was right to expel them from the city he imagined, when he was searching out the best character and the best condition for a state. But we, schooled by Greece of course, read them and memorize them from childhood, and call that a liberal education.
But why be angry with the poets? Philosophers — the professed teachers of virtue — have turned up who said pain is the greatest evil. But you, young man, when you said a moment ago that it seemed so to you, abandoned the opinion at a single word, the moment I asked whether it was greater than disgrace. Put the same question to Epicurus: he will answer that even a moderate pain is a greater evil than the deepest disgrace — since in disgrace itself there is nothing bad, unless pains follow it. Then what pain is dogging Epicurus when he says exactly this, that pain is the greatest evil? A deeper disgrace than that I cannot expect from a philosopher. So you gave me enough when you answered that disgrace seemed to you a greater evil than pain. If you hold on to just that, you will see how far pain deserves to be resisted — and that the real question is not so much whether pain is an evil as how to make the mind strong for bearing it.
The Stoics wrap it all up in petty little syllogisms proving pain is not an evil — as if the trouble were about a word and not a thing. Why are you tricking me, Zeno? When you flatly deny that what looks horrifying to me is an evil, I'm caught — I want to know how the thing I count most miserable of all fails even to be an evil. "Nothing is an evil," he says, "except what is base and vicious." You're back to trifling. You haven't removed what was strangling me. I know pain isn't wickedness — stop teaching me that. Teach me this: that being in pain or out of it makes no difference. "It never bears at all," he says, "on living happily — that rests on virtue alone. But pain is still to be rejected." Why? "It is harsh, contrary to nature, hard to endure, grim, hard."
There's a wealth of words — being able to say in so many different ways what we call by the one word "evil." You are defining pain, Zeno, not removing it, when you call it harsh, contrary to nature, something scarcely to be endured or borne. And you're not lying. But a man who swaggers in words shouldn't collapse in fact. "Nothing is good but what is honorable; nothing evil but what is base" — that is wishing, not teaching. Better and truer to say this: everything nature recoils from is among the evils, and everything she welcomes is among the goods. Grant that, and clear the quarrel over words out of the way, and still the thing those men rightly hold fast — what we call moral goodness, the right, the fitting, and sometimes wrap up under the single name of virtue — will tower so far above everything else that all the so-called goods of body and fortune look tiny and trivial beside it, and no evil, not even every evil piled together in one heap, comes near comparison with the evil of disgrace.
So if, as you conceded at the start, disgrace is worse than pain, then pain is plainly nothing. As long as groaning, shrieking, wailing, being broken and unstrung by pain looks base to you and unworthy of a man — as long as moral goodness, dignity, and honor stand beside you, and you keep your eyes fixed on them and hold yourself in — pain will yield to virtue, count on it, and go slack under the mind's sheer resolve. Either there is no such thing as virtue, or every pain is to be despised. Will you grant practical wisdom, without which no virtue can even be conceived? Then will practical wisdom let you strain at what gains nothing and labor in vain? Will self-control let you do anything without measure? Can justice be honored by a man who, under the force of pain, spills secrets, betrays his accomplices, and abandons one duty after another?
And courage, with its companions — greatness of spirit, gravity, patience, the settled contempt for human fortunes — what answer will you give them? Will you lie there flattened, moaning in a pitiful voice, and let someone say, "There's a brave man"? In that state no one would call you a man at all. So courage must be thrown overboard — or pain must be buried. You know how it is with your Corinthian bronzes: lose one piece, and the rest of the collection can still be safe without it. But the virtues are otherwise: lose one — though in truth virtue cannot be lost — but suppose you confess that you lack one, and you will be left with none at all.
Well then: can you call him a brave man, a great-spirited man, patient, grave, above human fortune — Philoctetes, say? I'd rather not take you as the example. But he, at least, is no brave man, lying under his dripping roof,
which, mute itself, resounds to his wails, his moans, his groans and roars, and gives him back his weeping.
I do not deny that pain is pain — otherwise why would courage ever be needed? — I say that patience overpowers it, if there is any patience. If there is none, then why do we dress philosophy up so finely, and why do we strut under its name? Pain stabs — fine, let it gouge. If you are naked, offer it your throat. But if you are covered by "the armor of Vulcan" — that is, by courage — then resist. If you don't, that guardian of your dignity will walk off and abandon you.
The laws of Crete — laid down by Jupiter, or by Minos at Jupiter's direction, as the poets tell it — and the laws of Lycurgus as well, train the young through hard labor: hunting, running, going hungry, going thirsty, freezing, sweltering. And at Sparta, boys are received at the altar with such whipping "that the blood streams thick out of their flesh" — sometimes, as I used to hear when I was there myself, whipped even to death. Not one of them ever cried out; not one so much as groaned. What then? Boys can do this, and grown men will not be able to? Custom has this much power, and reason will have none?
There is a difference between labor and pain. They sit right next to each other, but they differ. Labor is the performance, by mind or body, of some heavier piece of work or duty; pain is a harsh motion in the body, alien to the senses. The Greeks — whose language is richer than ours — call both of these by a single name, ponos. So they call industrious men "devoted to pain," or really "lovers of pain"; we say, more aptly, hardworking. Because laboring is one thing, and hurting is another. O Greece — sometimes so poor in the very words you think you're always rich in! Laboring, I say, is one thing, and hurting is another. When Gaius Marius had his varicose veins cut out, he hurt. When he marched at the head of his column in savage heat, he labored. And yet there is a family resemblance between the two: being accustomed to labor makes the endurance of pain easier.
That is why the men who gave Greece its forms of government wanted young bodies hardened by labor. The Spartans carried the policy even to their women, who in other cities are raised in the softest luxury, "hidden in the shadow of the walls." The Spartans wanted nothing of that kind for their girls,
whose passion is the wrestling ground, the Eurotas, sun, dust, toil, the drills of war — not breeding like barbarians.
So in these strenuous exercises pain comes running in from time to time: they are shoved, struck, thrown down, they fall — and the labor itself lays a kind of callus over pain.
Then there is military service — ours, I mean, not the Spartans', whose battle line steps forward in time to the flute and hardly takes a word of encouragement that isn't set to a marching beat. You can see, first, where our armies get their very name: exercitus, from exercise. And then think what labor a march is. Carrying more than half a month's rations; carrying whatever else they might need; carrying the stakes for the palisade — because as for shield, sword, and helmet, our soldiers no more count those as part of the load than they count their own shoulders, arms, and hands. Weapons, they say, are a soldier's limbs, and they carry them so handily that at need they can drop the packs and fight with their weapons as freely as with their limbs. And the legions' training! The running, the charge, the battle cry — what labor it all costs! That is where the spirit comes from that is ready for wounds in battle. Bring up an untrained soldier with just as much raw courage, and he will look like a woman.
Why is there as much difference as we have seen between a raw army and a veteran one? Recruits usually have the better of it in age; but bearing labor and despising wounds are things that only habit teaches. In fact, watch when the wounded are carried off the field. The raw, untrained man, hit ever so lightly, lets out the most shameful wailing; but the trained veteran — braver for that very reason — only looks for a doctor to bandage him, and says:
Patroclus, I come to you for help, for your hands, before an evil death dealt by an enemy's hand takes me down. There is no way to stop this flowing blood unless your skill can turn my death aside; the wounded fill the porches of the sons of Aesculapius — there is no getting near them.
That is Eurypylus, no question — a trained man!
And while his friend keeps piling on the grief, notice how far from tearful his answer is — he even supplies a reason why he should bear it calmly:
Whoever plans destruction for another should know an equal death is planned for him, to share.
Patroclus will now lead him off, I suppose, to lay him on a bed and dress the wound. If he were an ordinary human being, he would; but nothing of the kind. He asks how the battle went:
Speak, speak: how does the Argives' cause hold up in the fight?
No words could ever tell the toil as fully as the deeds have shown it.
So rest, then, and have the wound bound up. But even if Eurypylus could stop there, Aesopus — the actor playing him — could not:
When Hector's fortune pressed our faltering line...
and he unrolls all the rest of it, in pain as he is. That is how unbounded military glory is in a brave man. So a veteran soldier can manage this, and a trained and wise man will not be able to? He will manage it better — and not by a little.
But so far I am still talking about habit and training, not yet about reason and wisdom. Little old women often go without food for two or three days. Take an athlete's food away for one single day and he will cry out to Jupiter — Olympian Jupiter, the very god he trains for — and howl that he cannot stand it. Great is the force of habit. Hunters spend whole nights in the snow and let themselves be scorched in the mountains. Boxers, battered by the studded gloves, do not so much as groan.
But why mention men who treat a victory at Olympia like one of our old-time consulships? Gladiators — ruined men, or barbarians — what blows they take! See how men who have been properly trained would rather take a hit than dodge it in disgrace! How often it is plain that they want nothing more than to satisfy their owner or the crowd! Even worn down with wounds, they send to their owners to ask what they want: if the owners are satisfied, they are content to lie down and die. What gladiator of even middling quality has ever groaned, ever changed his face? Which of them has disgraced himself standing — or even going down? Which, once down and ordered to take the sword, has pulled in his neck? That is how much training, rehearsal, and habit can do. So this can be done by
a Samnite — a filthy fellow, worthy of that life and station —
and a man born for glory is going to have some part of his soul so soft that he cannot toughen it with rehearsal and reason? Some people find the gladiator shows cruel and inhuman, and the way they are run now, they may be right. But in the days when it was condemned men fighting it out with steel, there may have been stronger schoolings against pain and death for the ear — for the eye there was none.
I have now covered exercise, habit, and rehearsal. Come on, then, let us look at reason — unless you have something to say to all this.
"Interrupt you?" he said. "I wouldn't dream of it. Your argument is carrying me along toward believing it."
So I went on. Whether pain is an evil or not, the Stoics can see to; they try to prove pain is no evil with twisted, fussy little syllogisms that never sink in as far as the senses. My own view is this: whatever pain is, it is not as great as it appears; people are shaken far too hard by its false picture and appearance; and every pain is bearable. Where shall I begin, then? Shall I briefly touch on what I just said, so the argument can travel farther more easily?
This much everyone agrees on — the unlearned as well as the learned: that bearing pain with endurance is the mark of brave, great-spirited, patient men who rise above human weakness; and no one ever thought a man who bore it that way was anything but praiseworthy. So here is something demanded of the brave and praised whenever it happens — and is it not shameful to dread it while it approaches, or to buckle when it arrives? And consider this: though all the right conditions of the soul are called virtues, that may not strictly be the proper name for all of them; they may all have been named after the one that towered over the rest. "Virtue" comes from vir, the Latin for "man," and the quality most a man's own is courage, whose two greatest offices are the contempt of death and the contempt of pain. So we must exercise both if we want to possess virtue — or rather, if we want to be men, since virtue borrowed its very name from man. How, you may ask — and rightly, for that is exactly the medicine philosophy claims to offer.
Enter Epicurus — by no means a bad man; say rather, the best of men. He gives as much advice as he understands. "Ignore pain," he says. Who is saying this? The same man who calls pain the greatest evil. Not very consistent. Let us hear him out. "If pain is at its greatest," he says, "it is necessarily brief." "Run that past me again!" — because I do not quite grasp what you call "greatest" or what you call "brief." "Greatest is what nothing surpasses; brief is what nothing is briefer than. I despise the size of any pain when the shortness of its stay will rescue me from it almost before it arrives." But what if the pain is as great as Philoctetes' pain? "That looks plenty great to me — but still not the greatest. Nothing hurts him but his foot. The eyes can hurt, the head can, the sides, the lungs — everything can. So he is a long way from the greatest pain. Therefore," he says, "a long-lasting pain has more pleasure in it than trouble."
Now, I cannot say that so great a man understands nothing; my suspicion is that he is laughing at us. I say that the greatest pain — and I call it greatest even if some other pain runs ten atoms bigger — is not automatically brief, and I can name plenty of good men who have been racked for years on end by the fiercest pains of gout. Our clever friend never fixes any limit for the size or the duration, so that I could know what he calls "greatest" in pain and "brief" in time. Let us pass over him, then, as a man who says precisely nothing, and make him admit that remedies for pain are not to be had from someone who declared pain the greatest of all evils — however much the same man put up a brave little front under his colic and his kidney torments. No, the medicine has to be fetched from somewhere else — and if we are looking for what hangs together best, from those who hold that moral goodness is the highest good and disgrace the greatest evil. In their company you will certainly not dare to moan and thrash about. Virtue herself will speak to you with their voice:
"You? You have watched boys in Sparta, young men at Olympia, barbarians in the arena take the heaviest blows and bear them in silence — and if some pain gives you a pinch, you will scream like a woman instead of bearing it with steadiness and calm?" "It cannot be borne; nature will not allow it." — I hear you. Yet boys bear it, led on by glory; others bear it out of shame, many out of fear — and we still worry that nature cannot endure what is endured by so many people, in so many places? Nature does not merely endure it; she demands it. She has nothing finer, nothing she reaches for more, than moral goodness, than praise, than dignity, than honor. By all these names I mean one single thing; I use several to mark it as strongly as I can. What I want to say is that far the best thing for a human being is whatever is worth choosing for its own sake — springing from virtue or seated in virtue itself, praiseworthy on its own account. I would sooner call it the only good than deny that it is the highest good. And what holds for moral goodness holds in reverse for disgrace: nothing is so foul, so repellent, so unworthy of a human being.
If you are convinced of this — and at the beginning you said you saw more evil in disgrace than in pain — then what remains is for you to rule yourself. It is an odd way of talking, as though we were two people, one to command and the other to obey; and yet it is not a foolish way of talking. The soul is divided into two parts, one of which shares in reason while the other has none. So when we are told to command ourselves, this is what is meant: reason must rein in recklessness. In nearly every soul there is by nature something soft, low, cringing — nerveless, so to speak, and limp. If that were all a man had, nothing would be uglier than a human being. But standing ready is reason, the mistress and queen of everything, who by her own striving, advancing further and further, becomes perfected virtue. A man's task is to make sure that reason commands the part of the soul whose duty is to obey.
"How?" you will ask. The way a master commands a slave, a general a soldier, a parent a child. If that soft part of the soul I described behaves disgracefully — if it gives itself over to womanish wailing and tears — let it be tied down and put under the guard of friends and family. We often see people broken by shame whom no reasoning could ever defeat. Feelings like those we should lock up like runaway slaves, practically in chains and under watch; but those who are steadier without being fully hardened we should call to order like good soldiers being recalled to the standard: guard your dignity. In the Niptra, the wisest man of Greece does not lament his wound too much — he keeps it measured:
Step by step — go gently, keep the strain slow and steady, or the jolting will let a greater pain take hold of me.
Pacuvius handles this better than Sophocles, for in Sophocles Ulysses weeps over his wound all too tearfully. Yet even at this light groaning, the men carrying the wounded hero, with an eye on the dignity of the character, do not hesitate to say:
You too, Ulysses — grave though we see your wound to be, you are almost too soft in spirit, for a man whose whole life was spent in arms...
The shrewd poet understands that long habit in bearing pain is a teacher not to be despised.
And Ulysses, though his pain is great, keeps it within bounds:
Hold me, hold on! The wound is crushing me. Uncover it! Oh, wretched me! It is torture!
He begins to slip; then instantly he stops:
Cover it. Leave me. Let me be — your handling and your shaking only swell the savage pain.
Do you see how it fell silent? Not the pain of his body — that was not soothed — but the pain of his mind, which was disciplined. And so at the end of the Niptra he scolds others, even as he is dying:
To complain of hostile fortune is fitting; to wail over it is not. That is the duty of a man; weeping was assigned to woman's nature.
The softer part of his soul obeyed reason the way a soldier with a sense of shame obeys a stern general.
But the man in whom wisdom will be complete — a man we have never yet seen, though the philosophers' writings spell out what he will be like if he ever appears — that man, or rather the perfect and absolute reason in him, will command the lower part the way a just parent commands upright children: with a nod. It will accomplish what it wants with no labor, no trouble. He will rouse himself, brace himself, equip himself, arm himself, to stand against pain as against an enemy. And what are these arms? Tension, self-encouragement, and inner talk, when a man says to himself: "Nothing shameful now, nothing limp, nothing unmanly."
Let the noble examples pass before the mind. Think of Zeno of Elea, who suffered everything rather than name his partners in the plot to bring down the tyranny. Think of Anaxarchus, the follower of Democritus, who fell into the hands of Nicocreon, the king of Cyprus, and neither begged off any form of torture nor refused it. Calanus the Indian — untaught, a barbarian, born at the roots of the Caucasus — was burned alive by his own free choice. And we, if a foot aches, if a tooth does, cannot bear it. For there is a kind of soft, empty-headed opinion at work — in pleasure no less than in pain — and when we melt and go liquid with that softness, we cannot take a bee sting without a scream.
But Gaius Marius — a country-bred man, yet every inch a man — when he was operated on, as I said earlier, refused at the start to be strapped down; and no one before Marius is said to have been cut unbound. Why, then, were others able to bear it afterward? The force of his example. So do you see that pain is an evil of opinion, not of nature? And yet the same Marius showed that pain's bite is sharp: he would not offer the other leg. He bore pain like a man; and, like a sensible human being, he declined to bear a greater pain without a necessary reason. The whole point, then, is to be master of yourself. And I have shown what kind of mastery that is: this steady thinking about what is most worthy of patience, of courage, of greatness of spirit not only holds the soul in check but somehow makes the pain itself milder.
It is like what happens in battle. The cowardly, frightened soldier throws away his shield the moment he sees the enemy and runs as hard as he can — and sometimes he dies for exactly that reason, without a wound on his body, while the man who held his ground has nothing of the kind happen to him. In the same way, those who cannot bear the mere look of pain throw themselves away and lie there crushed and lifeless, while those who stood up to it very often come away the winners. For the soul has certain resemblances to the body. As loads are carried more easily by a body under tension and crush a body that goes slack, so the soul, by its own tension, pushes off the whole weight pressing on it — and by slackening is so pinned down that it cannot lift itself.
If we want the truth, the soul's tension is needed in carrying out every duty; it is duty's only bodyguard, so to speak. But in pain above all we must see to it that we do nothing abjectly, nothing timidly, nothing like a coward, a slave, or a woman — and, first and foremost, that Philoctetes-scream must be refuted and thrown out. Groaning is granted to a man now and then, and rarely at that; howling is not granted even to a woman. That wailing is the "lessus" which the Twelve Tables, our oldest laws, forbade at funerals.
In fact, a brave and wise man never groans at all — unless perhaps to tighten himself into firmness, the way runners in the stadium shout as loudly as they can. Athletes do the same in training, and boxers, when they land a blow, actually groan as they swing the studded gloves — not because they are in pain or losing heart, but because in flinging out the voice the whole body tightens, and the blow comes in harder. And men who want to shout at full volume — are they content to strain the sides, the throat, the tongue, the organs we see the voice drawn and poured from? No: the whole body, "every hoof and claw," as the saying goes, is thrown behind the straining of the voice.
I swear I saw Marcus Antonius touch his knee to the ground while he strained every nerve speaking in his own defense under the Varian law. Just as catapults and the other engines for hurling stones and darts throw harder the more tightly they are wound and drawn back, so a voice, a sprint, a blow lands heavier the more tension launches it. Since that tension has such power, here is my rule: if groaning in pain will help stiffen the spirit, we will use it. But if the groan is all lament — if it is weak, abject, tearful — then I would hardly call the man who gives in to it a man. Even if groaning did bring some relief, we would still have to ask whether it suited a brave and spirited man. But since it takes away none of the pain, why volunteer for disgrace and get nothing for it? What is more disgraceful in a man than crying like a woman?
And this rule given for pain reaches wider. Everything, not only pain, must be resisted with the same tension of soul. Anger flares up, lust is stirred — we run to the same citadel and take up the same weapons. But since pain is our subject, let those go. So, for bearing pain calmly and steadily, it helps enormously to consider with your whole heart, as the saying is, how honorable that is. For by nature — as I said before, and it needs saying often — we are the keenest lovers and seekers of moral goodness, and if we catch so much as a glimmer of its light, there is nothing we are not prepared to bear and to suffer to possess it. From this rush and charge of the soul toward true praise and honor come the dangers men face in battle. Brave men do not feel their wounds in the fighting line — or they feel them, and prefer death to stepping one inch down from the place their dignity holds.
The Decii saw the flashing swords of the enemy as they charged into their ranks. The nobility and glory of that death lifted all fear of wounds from them. Do you suppose Epaminondas groaned when he felt his life flowing out together with his blood? No — he was leaving his country ruling over the Spartans, when he had received it as their servant. These are the consolations, these the dressings, for the greatest pains.
You will say: what about in peacetime? At home? In bed? You are calling me back to the philosophers, who do not often march into the line. One of them, a decidedly flimsy character, Dionysius of Heraclea, learned courage from Zeno the Stoic — and then pain untaught him. His kidneys were tormenting him, and in the middle of his own howling he kept shouting that everything he had once believed about pain was false. When his fellow student Cleanthes asked what argument had driven him from his old opinion, he answered: "This one. If after giving so much work to philosophy I still could not bear pain, that would be proof enough that pain is an evil. Well, I have spent a great many years on philosophy, and I cannot bear it. Therefore pain is an evil." At that, the story goes, Cleanthes struck his foot on the ground and recited a line from the Epigoni:
Do you hear this, Amphiaraus, hidden under the earth?
He meant Zeno; he grieved that Dionysius had fallen away from him.
Not so our own Posidonius. I saw him often myself, and I will tell you what Pompeius used to relate. When Pompeius reached Rhodes on his way back from Syria, he wanted to hear Posidonius lecture; and on learning that he was gravely ill — his joints wracked with violent pain — he still wished at least to look in on so famous a philosopher. When he had seen him, greeted him, and paid him generous compliments, he said how sorry he was that he could not hear him speak. "But you can," Posidonius said. "I will not let bodily pain make so great a man's visit to me count for nothing." And so, Pompeius used to say, lying on his back he argued, gravely and at rich length, this very thesis: that nothing is good except what is morally good. And every time the pain came at him like torches held to his body, he would say: "You are wasting your effort, pain! Be as troublesome as you like — I will never admit that you are an evil."
In general, all hardships that carry fame and distinction become bearable on the spot. Do we not see that among peoples where the contests called gymnastic are held in high honor, the men who step into that arena shirk no pain? That where riding and hunting carry glory, the men who chase it refuse no pain? And what shall I say of our own ambitions, our hunger for office? What fire have candidates not run through to rake in votes one by one? That is why Africanus always had Xenophon, the student of Socrates, in his hands. He especially praised the saying that the same labors do not weigh equally on the general and the common soldier, because the honor itself makes the general's labor lighter.
Still, it turns out that even with the unwise crowd the notion of honor carries weight, though they cannot see the thing itself. They are steered by rumor and the verdict of the many, and count as honorable whatever most people praise. But you — even if you stand in the crowd's gaze, I would not have you rest on its judgment or take what it admires to be the finest thing there is. You must use your own judgment. If you can be pleased with yourself when you approve what is right, then you will have conquered not only yourself — which is what I was urging a moment ago — but everyone and everything.
So set this before your mind: a largeness of soul, a lifting of the soul as high as it will go, which shows itself most in scorning pains and looking down on them, is the single most beautiful thing there is — and the more beautiful if it does without the public, chases no applause, and finds its delight in itself. To me, in fact, everything seems the more praiseworthy the more it is done without advertisement and without the crowd for witness. Not that the public eye should be avoided — every good deed wants to stand in the light — but still, virtue has no greater theater than conscience.
And let us rehearse this above all: the endurance of pain, which I have said again and again must be firmed up by the soul's tension, should show itself the same in every situation. Many men who have bravely taken wounds and stood up under them — out of hunger for victory, or for glory, or to hold on to their rights and their liberty — cannot bear the pain of a disease once that tension is dropped. For they had borne the earlier pain not by reason or wisdom but by eagerness and glory. That is why certain wild barbarians can fight ferociously with the sword but cannot be sick like men, while the Greeks, not particularly brave but sensible as far as human capacity allows, cannot look an enemy in the face and yet bear disease patiently and with composure. And the Cimbri and the Celtiberians exult in battle and wail in sickness. Nothing can be steady that does not start from fixed reason.
But when you see that men led by eagerness or mere opinion are not broken by pain in chasing and winning what they are after, you ought to conclude one of two things: either pain is no evil, or — even if we agree to call whatever is harsh and against nature an evil — it is so tiny an evil that virtue buries it until it disappears from view. Think this over, I beg you, day and night. For this argument will spread; it will occupy considerably more ground than the question of pain alone. If we do everything to flee disgrace and to win moral goodness, we will be free to despise not only the needles of pain but even the lightning bolts of fortune — especially since that refuge from yesterday's discussion stands ready.
Imagine a sailor with pirates in pursuit, and a god who says to him: "Throw yourself from the ship. Something stands by to catch you — a dolphin, as one caught Arion of Methymna, or those horses of Pelops, Neptune's gift, which are said to have 'swept the chariot along, skimming above the waves.' They will catch you and carry you wherever you wish." That man would drop every fear. Just so, when harsh and hateful pains bear down: if they are so great that they ought not to be borne, you see where the refuge lies. That is about all I thought needed saying today. But perhaps you still hold your old opinion.
"Not in the least," he said. "These two days, I hope, have freed me from the fear of the two things I feared most."
"Tomorrow, then, we meet the water clock — rhetoric, as we agreed. Though I can see the philosophy hour is a debt I will still owe you."
"Exactly — rhetoric before noon, and this at the same hour as today."
"So we will do, and I will gladly go along with this excellent zeal of yours."
What reason should I give, Brutus, for this: we are made of soul and body, and yet an art for the body's care and upkeep has been sought out — its usefulness so prized that its invention was credited to the immortal gods — while medicine for the soul was neither missed before it was discovered, nor much cultivated after it became known, nor welcomed and approved by nearly as many people; in fact, more people eye it with suspicion and dislike. Why? Is it because we use the soul to judge the body's heaviness and pain, but never use the body to feel the soul's disease? So it works out that the soul must sit in judgment on itself at exactly the moment when the judge is the thing that's sick.
If nature had made us able to look straight into her and see her clearly, and to finish the course of life with her as our best guide, no one would have any reason to need method and instruction. As it is, she gave us only tiny sparks — and, corrupted early by bad habits and bad opinions, we snuff them out so completely that nature's light never shows anywhere. The seeds of the virtues are born into our characters, and if they were allowed to grow up, nature herself would carry us through to a happy life. Instead, the moment we are delivered into daylight and taken up into a family, we live and move in unbroken crookedness and in the deepest perversity of opinion, so that we seem to have sucked in error almost with our nurse's milk. Then, when we are returned to our parents and afterward handed over to teachers, we are steeped in errors of so many kinds that truth surrenders to emptiness, and nature herself gives way to settled opinion.
Then come the poets. Because they put on such a grand show of learning and wisdom, they are listened to, read, memorized — and they sink deep into our minds and stay there. And when the people are added on top — the people, that supreme schoolmaster — and the whole crowd on every side agreeing to be vicious together, then we are dyed through with corrupt opinions and desert nature altogether. So it seems to us that the men who best understood what nature offers are the ones who decided there is nothing better for a human being, nothing more worth wanting, nothing finer, than office, command, and popular glory. Toward that glory every best man is drawn; and while he hunts for the true moral goodness that nature seeks above everything else, he finds himself busy with pure emptiness, chasing not any solid figure of virtue but a sketched outline of glory. For real glory is a solid thing, fully worked, nothing sketchy about it: it is the agreed praise of good men, the uncorrupted voice of those who judge outstanding virtue rightly; it answers back to virtue like an echo. And because it usually walks beside right actions, good men should not wave it away.
But the other thing — the one that sets itself up as glory's imitator: rash, unthinking, usually a cheerleader for sins and vices — popular fame — spoils the very shape and beauty of moral goodness by dressing up in its costume. Blinded this way, men who wanted things that really were splendid, but had no idea where those things were to be found or what they looked like, have in some cases overturned their own countries from the foundations, and in others destroyed themselves. Even these men, aiming at the best, went wrong not so much by intention as by mistaking the course. But what about the ones swept along by hunger for money or by lust for pleasures — the ones whose souls get so churned up that they stand not far from madness, which is the condition of everyone who lacks wisdom? Should no treatment at all be applied to them? Is it because the soul's sicknesses do less harm than the body's? Or because bodies can be treated, while for souls there is no medicine at all?
But the soul's diseases are both more destructive and more numerous than the body's. They are hateful in themselves, precisely because they touch the soul and keep it in torment; and a sick soul, as Ennius says, "is forever astray: it can neither endure nor hold out, and it never stops desiring." Leave the others aside — what diseases of the body could be graver than these two alone, grief and desire? And how can anyone argue that the soul cannot treat itself, when the soul is what invented medicine for the body in the first place? In bodily cures, constitution and nature themselves carry much of the load, and not everyone who submits to treatment promptly gets well. But souls that want to be healed, and that follow the precepts of the wise, are healed — without any question.
There is, most certainly, a medicine for the soul: philosophy. And its help is not to be fetched from outside, the way it is for diseases of the body. We must labor with every resource and all our strength to become able to doctor ourselves. Now, about philosophy as a whole — how much it deserves to be sought and cultivated — I have said enough, I think, in my Hortensius; and since then I have hardly stopped either discussing or writing about the greatest questions. These books lay out the discussions I held with my friends at my villa in Tusculum. The two earlier ones dealt with death and with pain; the third day's discussion will make up this third volume.
We came down into our Academy when the day was already leaning into afternoon, and I asked one of those present to give me a subject to argue. Then the business ran like this.
"The wise man seems to me to be subject to grief," he began.
"And to the rest of the soul's disorders too?" I asked. "Fears, lusts, fits of anger? These are, roughly, the things the Greeks call pathe. I could call them 'diseases,' and that would be a word-for-word translation, but it would not fit our way of speaking. Pitying, envying, exulting, rejoicing — the Greeks call every one of these a disease: a movement of a soul that will not obey reason. We call these same movements of an agitated soul disorders, and I think we are right to; 'diseases' would strain ordinary Latin — unless you see it differently."
"No, I see it your way," he said.
"And you really think these things befall the wise man?"
"I certainly do."
"Then that much-advertised wisdom is not worth a great deal — if it stands only a step away from madness."
"What?" he said. "Does every stirring of the mind look like madness to you?"
"Not to me only. Our ancestors thought so too — I have often marveled at this — many centuries before Socrates; and from Socrates flows this whole philosophy of life and conduct."
"How so, exactly?"
"Because the very name for madness, insania, declares a sickness and disease of the mind: an un-soundness, that is — a sick and ailing soul is what they labeled mad.
"Now the philosophers call all the disorders of the soul diseases, and they deny that any fool is ever free of them. But whoever is in disease is not sound; and the souls of all fools are in disease; therefore all fools are mad. For our ancestors held that soundness of soul rests on a certain tranquility and steadiness; a mind emptied of those they named unsound — insane — because in a disturbed soul, exactly as in a disturbed body, soundness could not exist.
"And it was no less sharp of them to give the state of a soul cut off from the mind's light the names amentia and dementia — mindlessness, being out of one's mind. From this you can see that the men who fastened these names onto things had sensed the very truth that Socrates taught and that the Stoics, receiving it from him, have carefully kept: that no one who lacks wisdom is sound. A soul in the grip of some disease — and, as I said a moment ago, the philosophers call these disturbed movements diseases — is no more sound than a body in the grip of one. So wisdom turns out to be the soul's soundness, and folly a kind of un-soundness, which is insania — madness — and dementia besides. And all of this our Latin words mark far better than the Greek ones do —
"Something you will find true in many other places as well — but that is for another time. Now for what is in front of us. The thing we are asking about — what it is and what kind of thing — the sheer force of the word declares. We must count as sound those whose minds are disturbed by no movement, as if by disease; and it follows that those in the opposite condition have to be called unsound. So nothing beats the everyday Latin idiom that says a man carried away unbridled by lust or by anger has 'gone out of his own power' — though anger is really just a part of lust; the definition runs: anger is the lust for revenge. Those said to have gone out of their own power are called that because they are no longer in the power of the mind — and nature gave the mind kingship over the whole soul. Where the Greeks got their word mania, I could not easily say; yet we carve up the thing itself better than they do. We keep this madness, insania — which, being twinned with folly, covers a broad field — separate from furor, frenzy. The Greeks want the same distinction, but their word lets them down: what we call furor they call melancholia — as if a mind were unhinged only by black bile, and not, just as often, by some heavier surge of anger, or fear, or pain; it is in that sense we say that Athamas, Alcmaeon, Ajax, and Orestes were in frenzy. A man in that condition the Twelve Tables forbid to remain master of his own property — and notice that the words run not 'if he be mad,' insanus, but 'if he be frenzied,' furiosus. For our ancestors judged that folly, though empty of steadiness — that is, of soundness — could still keep up the middling run of duties and the common, customary business of life; but frenzy they understood to be a blindness of the mind toward everything. And though frenzy looks like the greater affliction, it is of such a kind that the wise man can suffer frenzy — and cannot suffer madness. But that is a separate question; let us get back to our subject."
"You said, I believe, that in your view grief can touch the wise man."
"I did, and I still think so."
Only human that he should, I told him — and with that I settled into the day's argument. We are not carved out of flint. There is in our souls, by nature, something tender and soft, which grief shakes the way a storm shakes a ship. And Crantor, one of the most celebrated men our Academy has produced, was not talking nonsense when he wrote: "I do not agree at all with those who make such loud praise of this so-called insensibility — a thing that neither can exist nor should. Let me not be ill; but if I am ill, let me keep my feeling, whether something is being cut out of my body or torn away from it. For this state of feeling nothing is bought at a heavy price: a soul turned savage, a body gone numb."
But let us be careful that this is not simply the talk of men flattering our weakness and indulging our softness. Let us have the daring not merely to prune back the branches of our miseries, but to tear out every last fiber of their roots. Something may be left behind even so — that is how deep the roots of folly run — but nothing will be left except what is necessary. Hold on to this much, though: unless the soul is healed, and without philosophy that cannot happen, there will be no end of our miseries. So, since we have begun, let us hand ourselves over to philosophy for treatment. We shall be healed — if we are willing. And I will take the argument further: I am going to deal not with grief alone, though grief comes first, but with every disorder of the soul, as I have named it — every "disease," as the Greeks prefer to say. And first, if you like, we will proceed in the manner of the Stoics, who like to lace their arguments up short and tight; after that we will range more freely, in my usual fashion.
Whoever is brave is confident. (I avoid the word confidens, because a bad habit of speech has turned it into a term of blame, though it is drawn from confidere, "to trust fully," which deserves praise.) And whoever is confident is certainly not gripped by dread; confidence and fear do not go together. But whoever grief touches, fear touches too — for the very things whose presence grieves us are the things we fear while they hang over us and come on. That is how grief and courage come to be at war. So it is likely that whoever is open to grief is open to fear as well, and to a broken and sinking spirit besides. And when those fall on a man, they bring him to servitude — to admitting, someday, that he has been beaten. Whoever accepts all that must accept timidity and cowardice with it. But these things do not befall a brave man; therefore neither does grief. And no one is wise who is not brave: therefore grief will not touch the wise man.
Further: the brave man is necessarily a man of great spirit; the man of great spirit is unconquerable; and the unconquerable man looks down on human affairs and counts them beneath him. But no one can be grieved by the very things he looks down on; from which it follows that the brave man is never touched by grief. And all wise men are brave: therefore grief does not touch the wise man. Again, just as an eye that is disturbed is in no fit state to do its work, and just as the other parts, and the whole body itself, fail in their work and office when knocked out of their proper condition, so a disturbed soul is not fit to carry out its task. And the soul's task is to use reason well. Now the wise man's soul is always in the condition to use reason at its very best; therefore it is never disturbed. But grief is a disturbance of the soul: therefore the wise man will always be free of it.
Here is another likely conclusion, about the man of self-control. The Greeks call him sophron, and the virtue itself sophrosyne — which I render sometimes "self-control," sometimes "moderation," now and then even "modesty." But I rather suspect the virtue could properly be called frugality, frugalitas. The Greek equivalent is narrower: they call frugal men chresimoi, which means merely "useful." Our word reaches wider: all abstinence, all harmlessness — a quality the Greeks have no everyday name for, though ablabeia would serve, since harmlessness is the disposition of a soul that injures no one — frugality embraces the remaining virtues too. If it were not so large a thing — if it were really penned into the narrow limits most people imagine — the surname of Lucius Piso, Frugi, "the Worthy," would never have been held in such honor.
But since we never call a man frugi who deserts his post out of fear — that is cowardice — or who secretly keeps back a deposit out of greed — that is injustice — or who bungles an undertaking out of recklessness — that is folly — the word frugality wraps up three virtues inside itself: courage, justice, and practical wisdom. (Though this much is common to all the virtues; every one of them is bound and yoked to the others.) So let frugality itself stand as the remaining, fourth virtue. Its own special property seems to be this: to govern and quiet the soul's grasping impulses, to stand always against lust, and to keep a moderate steadiness in everything it does. The vice set opposite it is called nequitia — worthlessness.
Frugalitas, I take it, comes from frux, the fruit of the earth — the best thing earth gives us. Nequitia comes — this may be a stretch, but let us try it; if there is nothing in it, we will be assumed to have been playing — from nequicquam, "to no purpose": everything in such a man being to no purpose, he also gets called nihili, "worth nothing." Well then: whoever is frugal — or, if you like it better, moderate and self-controlled — must be steady; whoever is steady is calm; whoever is calm is free of every disorder, and so free of grief. And those are the marks of the wise man: therefore grief will keep its distance from the wise man. So Dionysius of Heraclea argues rather neatly against the complaint Achilles makes in Homer — it runs, I think, like this:
and my heart deep inside me swells with bitter anger whenever I remember myself stripped of honor and of all my glory.
Is a hand in its proper condition, he asks, when it is swollen? Is any limb, once puffed and swollen, in anything but a faulty state? Then a soul that is inflated and swollen is in a faulty state too. But the wise man's soul is always free of fault; it never swells, never puffs up — and the angry man's soul is exactly like that. So the wise man never grows angry. For if he is angry, he also lusts: it is the angry man's defining property to crave to burn the deepest possible pain into whoever seems to have injured him. And whoever craves that must, if he pulls it off, feel great joy — which means he rejoices in another man's misfortune. Since the wise man is not capable of that, he is not capable of anger either. But if grief could touch the wise man, anger could too; and since he is free of anger, he will be free of grief as well.
Besides, if the wise man could fall into grief, he could fall into pity, and into enviousness too. I say enviousness, invidentia, not invidia — envy in that strict sense exists only at the moment someone is envied; but from the verb invidere we can properly form invidentia, and so slip past the ambiguous word. The word itself comes from looking too hard — in-videre — into another man's fortune, as in the Melanippus:
Who has cast an envious eye upon the flower of my children?
Bad Latin, you may say — but Accius put it splendidly: just as with videre, "to see," so "to envy the flower," with a direct object, is more correct than "at the flower." Common usage bars the rest of us; the poet stood on his own rights and said it the bolder way.
So pitying and envying fall to one and the same man: whoever aches at somebody's bad fortune also aches at somebody's good fortune. Think of Theophrastus, who, while mourning the death of his comrade Callisthenes, is tormented by the successes of Alexander — which is why he says that Callisthenes fell into the hands of a man of supreme power and supreme fortune who had no idea how good fortune ought to be used. And just as pity is grief over another's adversity, so enviousness is grief over another's prosperity. Whoever is open to pitying, then, is open to envying; but envying does not touch the wise man; so neither does pitying. If the wise man were in the habit of taking things hard, he would be in the habit of pitying too. Therefore grief stands far from the wise man.
That is how the Stoics put the case, and their conclusions come out rather tightly twisted. At some point it will all have to be said more broadly and expansively; but we should still lean chiefly on the judgments of the men whose reasoning and verdicts are the bravest and, if I may put it this way, the most manly. For the Peripatetics, my good friends — nothing is richer than they are, nothing more learned, nothing more weighty — do not really win me over with their "moderate amounts" of the soul's disorders or diseases. Every evil, even a moderate one, is an evil; and our aim is that in the wise man there be none at all. A body is not healthy when it is even mildly sick, and in just the same way that "moderate amount" in the soul is an absence of health. So our own countrymen, with their usual fine touch — here as in so much else — took trouble, worry, and anguish and named them all aegritudo, "grief," after their likeness to sick bodies, aegri.
The Greeks cover every disorder of the soul with nearly this one word: they call any turbulent motion in the soul pathos — that is, disease. We name it better. Grief truly does resemble a sick body; but lust does not resemble sickness, and neither does unmeasured joy, which is an elated, exultant pleasure of the soul. Even fear is not much like a disease, though it lives next door to grief. But strictly, just as sickness in the body — aegrotatio — so grief in the soul — aegritudo — bears a name that is not divorced from pain. So we must explain where this pain comes from: the cause that produces grief in the soul the way sickness is produced in the body. For just as physicians reckon the cure found once the cause of a disease is found, so we, once we find the cause of grief, will have found the means of treating it.
The cause, then, lies wholly in opinion — and not only the cause of grief, but of all the other disorders as well. They are four in kind, with many subdivisions. Every disorder is a movement of the soul that is either empty of reason, or contemptuous of reason, or disobedient to reason; and since that movement is set off in two ways — by an opinion of good or by an opinion of evil — the four disorders divide up evenly. Two come from an opinion of good. One of these is exultant pleasure — joy lifted beyond all measure — springing from the opinion of some great good presently at hand. The other is desire, which can rightly be called lust as well: an unmeasured reaching after an imagined great good, in defiance of reason.
So these two kinds, exultant pleasure and lust, are stirred up by an opinion of goods, just as the remaining two, fear and grief, are stirred up by an opinion of evils. For fear is the opinion of a great evil hanging over us, and grief is the opinion of a great evil already upon us — and, more exactly, a fresh opinion of an evil so great that anguish over it seems the right response: that is, the man in distress believes he ought to be in distress. These disorders — the Furies, so to speak, that folly looses on human life and whips forward — must be fought with all our strength and all our resources, if we want to carry the portion of life we have been given across in tranquility and peace. But the rest can wait for other days. For now, let us drive grief out if we can. Let that be our task, since you said grief seems to you to touch the wise man. I say it cannot, in any way; for grief is a hideous thing, wretched, detestable, to be fled with every straining effort — with sails and oars, as the saying goes.
Look at this man — how does he strike you? —
the seed of Tantalus, the son of Pelops, who once carried Hippodamea off from her father, King Oenomaus, and so became his son-in-law by a stolen wedding —
A great-grandson of Jupiter himself, no less. And is he really so cast down, so utterly broken?
Come no closer to me, friends — stop there, stand back! lest my contagion or my very shadow fall on decent men. So monstrous a power of crime is lodged fast in my body.
Will you condemn yourself, Thyestes, and rob yourself of the light of day, because of the force of a crime that was another man's? And what about that son of the Sun — do you not find him unworthy of his own father's light?
His eyes have shrunk back; his body has withered to a husk; tears have eaten channels down his bloodless cheeks; his beard, bristling with filth around his ruined face, hangs unshorn, darkening a chest scaled over with grime.
These evils, Aeetes, fool above fools, you added to yourself. They were not among the things chance had carted in on you — and your evil was an old one by then; the swelling of the soul had already gone down (for grief, as I shall show, lies in the opinion of an evil that is fresh). No: what you mourn, plainly, is your lost kingdom, not your lost daughter. Her you hated, and maybe with reason; it was the kingdom you could not calmly do without. And it is a shameless grief that eats a man alive because he is no longer permitted to give orders to the free.
Dionysius the tyrant, driven out of Syracuse, taught schoolboys at Corinth — that is how impossible he found it to live without command. And what was ever more shameless than Tarquinius, who made war on the very men who had refused to endure his arrogance? When neither the arms of Veii nor those of the Latins could set him back on his throne, he took himself off, the story goes, to Cumae, and in that city old age and grief wore him down to death. Do you really judge, then, that this can happen to a wise man — to be crushed under grief, which is to say, under misery? Every disorder is misery, but grief is the torture chamber itself. Lust carries a fever in it, exultant joy a giddiness, fear an abjectness; but grief carries something worse: wasting, torment, affliction, ugliness. It claws the soul, gnaws it through, and destroys it utterly. Unless we strip grief off and throw it away from us, we cannot be free of misery.
This much, at least, is clear: grief arises when something strikes us in such a way that a great evil seems to be present and pressing down on us. Epicurus holds that grief just is, by its nature, this opinion of evil — that anyone who fixes his eyes on some serious evil, and supposes it has happened to him, is instantly in grief. The Cyrenaics judge that not every evil produces grief — only an evil that is unhoped-for and unexpected. And that, admittedly, is no small factor in swelling grief: everything sudden seems heavier. That is why these lines are justly praised:
When I fathered my sons, I knew then that they would die, and I raised them knowing it. When I sent them to Troy to defend Greece, I knew I was sending them to a deadly war, not to a banquet.
This premeditation of future evils, then, softens their arrival: you have watched them coming from a long way off. That is why the lines Euripides gives to Theseus are so admired. Allow me, as I often do, to turn them into our own language:
I kept in mind what a learned man once told me, and rehearsed my future miseries alone: bitter death, or exile's mournful flight, or some other looming mass of evil — so that if disaster ever crashed in by chance, no sudden care could tear me unprepared.
What Theseus says he heard from a learned man, Euripides is really saying about himself, for he had been a student of Anaxagoras — the man who, the story goes, when news came of his son's death, answered: "I knew that I had fathered a mortal." That reply tells you exactly whom these blows embitter: those who never thought about them beforehand. So there is no doubt that everything regarded as evil lands heavier when it comes unforeseen. And although this is not the single cause of the greatest grief, still — since the mind's foresight and preparation can do so much to lessen pain — a human being should keep everything that can happen to human beings meditated in advance, always. Surely this is that surpassing, godlike wisdom: to have grasped human affairs deeply and turned them over from every side; to be astonished at nothing when it happens; and to judge, before the event, that there is nothing that cannot happen.
So every man, when his affairs are going at their very best, should study hardest then how to bear the storm when it turns: dangers, losses — coming home from abroad, let him turn them over always — a son's misdeed, a wife's death, a daughter's illness — that these are common things, so none can ever strike his mind as new; and whatever falls out better than he feared, let him count it all clear gain.
Now if Terentius could put this so neatly — and he took it from philosophy — shall not we, from whose fountains he drew it, say it better and hold to it more steadily? This is where that famous expression comes from, the face that never changed, which Xanthippe used to praise in her husband Socrates: she said she saw him leave the house and come home always with the same look. And it was not the set brow of old Marcus Crassus — the man who, Lucilius says, laughed exactly once in his entire life — but calm and serene; so we are told. And the face had every right to be always the same, since the mind that shapes it underwent no change. So yes: from the Cyrenaics I gladly accept these weapons against chance and accident, weapons that break the force of oncoming attacks through long premeditation. But at the same time I conclude that the evil itself lies in opinion, not in nature. For if it were in the thing itself, why would foresight make it lighter?
But something subtler can be said on these same matters — once we have first looked at Epicurus's position. He holds that everyone who believes himself to be in the midst of evils must necessarily be in grief, whether those evils were foreseen and expected or have simply grown old with him. For on his view evils are not diminished by time and not lightened by rehearsal; and it is plain folly, he says, to meditate on evil that is still to come, or that may never come at all. Every evil is hateful enough when it arrives; the man who is forever thinking that something bad might happen makes that evil a permanent tenant; and if it never happens at all, he has shouldered voluntary misery for nothing. Either way he is in anguish forever — suffering the evil, or imagining it.
The relief of grief he rests on two operations: calling the mind away from brooding on trouble, and calling it back to the contemplation of pleasures. For he believes the mind can obey reason and follow where reason leads. Reason, then, forbids us to stare at our troubles; it drags us away from bitter thoughts and blunts the mind's gaze so it cannot fix on misery. And once it has sounded the retreat from all that, it pushes us forward again, spurring us to gaze at pleasures of every variety and handle them with the whole mind — pleasures with which, he thinks, the wise man's life is filled, partly through memory of past ones, partly through hope of those to come. I have put all this in my own manner; the Epicureans put it in theirs. But let us look at what they say, and never mind how they say it.
First: they are wrong to condemn the premeditation of things to come. Nothing so blunts and lifts grief as the lifelong thought that there is nothing that cannot happen — as meditation on the human condition, on the law of life, and on the discipline of obeying that law. This does not make us mourn always; it makes us mourn never. For the man who reflects on the nature of things, on the shifting variety of life, on the frailty of the human race, does not mourn while he reflects; he is then, more than at any other time, performing the office of wisdom. He gains two things at once: in contemplating human affairs, he enjoys philosophy's own proper work; and against adversity, he is healed by a threefold consolation. First, he has long considered that this could happen — and that one thought, more than anything, thins out and dissolves every trouble. Second, he understands that human things must be borne in a human way. Third, he sees that there is no evil except fault — and there is no fault when what happened was something no human being could have prevented.
As for that calling-away he offers, when he summons us from looking at our evils — there is nothing in it. It is simply not in our power to shrug off or forget the things that stab at us, once we hold the opinion that they are evils. They tear at us, they harass us, they drive in the goads, they bring up the fire; they do not let us breathe. And you order us to forget — which is against nature — while you wrench away the one help nature gave us against pain grown old? That medicine is slow, I grant, but it is great: the medicine that long time and the passing days bring. You order me to think about good things and forget the bad. You would be saying something — something worthy of a great philosopher, no less — if you thought those things good which are most worthy of a human being.
Suppose Pythagoras said this to me, or Socrates, or Plato: "Why are you lying there? Why are you mourning? Why do you buckle and give way to fortune? Perhaps she was able to pinch you and sting you; she certainly was not able to break your strength. There is great power in the virtues. Rouse them, if they happen to be asleep. First to your side will come courage, which will force such spirit into you that you will despise everything that can befall a human being and count it as nothing. Self-control will be there — the same thing as moderation, the virtue I called frugality a little while ago — and it will not let you do anything shameful or worthless. And what is more worthless or shameful than an effeminate man? Not even justice will let you carry on this way, though she might seem to have the smallest part in this case. Yet even she will tell you that you are unjust twice over: you grasp at what belongs to another when, born mortal, you demand the condition of the immortals; and you take it hard that you have given back what you received only on loan.
"And what will you answer to practical wisdom, when she teaches that virtue is sufficient by herself — for living well, and equally for living happily? If virtue hung tied to externals, if she did not arise from herself and return to herself, embracing everything of her own and seeking nothing from outside, I cannot see why she should be thought worth praising so passionately in words or pursuing so eagerly in fact." If it is to goods like these you call me back, Epicurus, I obey, I follow, I take you yourself as my guide; I even forget my evils, as you command — and all the more easily because I do not think they should be counted among evils at all. But no: you steer my thoughts toward pleasures. Which pleasures? The body's, I suppose, or the ones entertained in memory or in hope for the body's sake. Is there anything else? Am I reading your doctrine correctly? For your followers like to say that we do not understand what Epicurus means.
This is what he means — and this is what that tart old man Zeno, the sharpest of the whole school, used to insist on in a loud voice at Athens, in my own hearing: that the happy man is the one who enjoys present pleasures and is confident he will go on enjoying them, through all his life or most of it, with no pain breaking in; or, if pain does break in, then if it is extreme it will be brief, and if it drags on, it will still carry more sweetness than misery. The man who thinks all this through will be happy — above all if he rests content with the good things he has already tasted and fears neither death nor the gods. There you have Epicurus's blueprint of the happy life, drawn in Zeno's words — so that nothing about it can be denied.
Well then? Can setting up this life and meditating on it relieve Thyestes? Or Aeetes, whom I spoke of a little earlier? Or Telamon, driven from his country, an exile and a beggar — the man over whom people marveled:
Is this that Telamon, whom glory only now raised to the sky, on whom the Greeks would fasten their gaze, toward whose face they turned their own?
And if any man finds, as the same poet says, that his "spirit has collapsed together with his fortunes," the medicine must be sought from those grave old philosophers, not from these pleasure-dealers. What abundance of goods do they even offer? Suppose we grant that the highest good is not being in pain — though no one calls that pleasure; but there is no need to go through everything now. Is that what we are to be led over to, so that our mourning is lightened? Grant, too, that being in pain is the greatest evil. Does it follow that a man who is not in pain, the instant he is free of that evil, is enjoying the highest good?
Why do we keep dodging, Epicurus? Why not confess that we mean by pleasure exactly what you are in the habit of calling it — once you have rubbed the blush off your face? Are these your words or not? In the book that contains the whole of your teaching, you say the following — I will simply play the translator now, so no one thinks I am inventing: "Nor can I find anything I could understand as that good, if I subtract the pleasures perceived by taste, subtract the pleasures of sex, subtract the pleasures the ears drink in from songs, subtract as well the sweet sensations the eyes receive from beautiful forms — or any other pleasure that any sense whatever generates in the whole person. Nor can it be claimed that gladness of mind alone belongs among the goods. For a glad mind, as I know it, is this: the hope of all the things I named above — that nature will come to possess them, free of pain."
And that in words so plain that anyone can understand what pleasure Epicurus has in mind. Then, a little further down: "I have often asked the men who were called wise," he says, "what they would have left among the goods once they had subtracted all of that — unless they simply wanted to pour out empty noise. I could learn nothing from them. If they insist on bubbling over with their 'virtues' and 'wisdoms,' they will be describing nothing but the process by which the pleasures I named above are produced." What follows runs in the same vein, and his whole book on the highest good is stuffed with words and sentiments of this kind.
And this is the life you will call Telamon back to, to ease his grief? If you see one of your own people crushed by mourning, will you hand him a sturgeon sooner than some little Socratic treatise? Urge him to listen to the notes of the water organ rather than to Plato? Spread out flowerbeds, bright and various, for him to gaze at? Press a bouquet of blossoms to his nose? Burn incense, and order him crowned with garlands and roses? And if something more besides — ah, then you really will have wiped his mourning clean away.
Epicurus must own all of this — or else delete from his book the passages I just quoted word for word — or better, throw out the whole book, since it is packed solid with pleasures. So we must ask how to free from grief a man who talks like this:
By Pollux, what fails me now is fortune, more than birth. A kingdom once was mine — mark, then, from how high a place, from what great wealth, from what a state my fortune fell.
What — are we to shove a cup of honeyed wine into his hands so he stops weeping, or something of that sort? And look, here from the same poet is the other side:
From the summit of wealth, stripped of help — of your help, Hector —
We ought to come to her aid; she is calling for it:
What protection shall I seek, what course pursue? What support is left me now for exile or for flight? Citadel and city are torn away. Where can I throw myself down? Where put in to shore? No ancestral altars stand at home; broken and scattered they lie, the shrines burned out by fire, the high walls standing scorched, disfigured, their fir beams buckled —
You know what follows, and this above all:
O father, O fatherland, O house of Priam, temple shut fast by the high-groaning hinge! I saw you when barbaric wealth stood all around you, your ceilings carved and coffered, fitted out royally in gold and ivory.
What a poet! — though these crooners of Euphorion look down on him. He feels the truth: everything sudden and unhoped-for strikes harder. So, having piled the king's riches high — riches that looked as though they would last forever — what does he add?
All this I saw go up in flame: Priam's life torn from him by force, and Jupiter's altar fouled with blood.
A magnificent song — mournful in its matter, its words, and its music alike. Very well: let us take her grief away. How? Shall we lay her on a feather cushion, bring in a harp-girl, give her scented ointment, set a little pan of incense burning, and see to some sweetish drink and a bit of food? Are these, at last, the goods that draw off the heaviest griefs? You told me just now you could not so much as conceive of any others. That we ought to be called back from mourning to the contemplation of good things — on that I would agree with Epicurus, if only we could agree on what is good. Someone will say: "What, then? Do you really suppose Epicurus meant all that — that his doctrines were doctrines of self-indulgence?" Not for a moment. I can see that he says much that is austere, much that is splendid. So, as I have said many times, the question is about his sharpness of mind, not his morals. However much he may scorn the pleasures he was just now praising, I will still remember what he takes the highest good to be. For he did not merely set down the word "pleasure"; he spelled out what he meant by it. "Taste," he says, "and the embrace of bodies, and shows and songs, and the forms that stir the eyes with delight." Am I inventing? Am I lying? I would love to be refuted — for what am I laboring after, except to have the truth laid open in every question?
"But the same man says that pleasure does not grow once pain is removed, and that the greatest pleasure is to feel no pain." Three great blunders in a handful of words. First, he contradicts himself. Just now he could not so much as imagine anything good unless the senses were, so to speak, tickled by pleasure; now he says the greatest pleasure is to be free of pain. Can a man fight with himself more openly? The second blunder: where nature offers three states — feeling glad, feeling pain, and feeling neither gladness nor pain — he treats the first and the third as identical, and refuses to distinguish pleasure from the mere absence of pain. The third blunder he shares with certain others: though virtue is the thing most worth seeking, and philosophy itself was sought out for the sake of attaining it, he has cut the highest good loose from virtue.
"But he often praises virtue." So he does — and Gaius Gracchus, after making the most lavish handouts and pouring the treasury out, still defended the treasury — in words. Why should I listen to words when I can see deeds? That Lucius Piso, the one surnamed Frugi, had spoken against the grain law from the start. The law passed — and there was the ex-consul, coming to collect his grain. Gracchus spotted Piso standing in the assembly and asked him, with the Roman people listening, how he could square taking grain under the very law he had argued against. "I would rather you did not take it into your head, Gracchus, to divide my property up man by man," he said, "but if you do, I will come for my share." Did that grave and wise man not declare plainly enough that the Sempronian law was squandering the public inheritance? Read Gracchus's speeches, and you will call him the treasury's own advocate.
Epicurus says no one can live pleasantly who does not live with virtue; he says fortune has no power over the wise man; he prefers plain fare to plenty; he says there is no moment at which the wise man is not happy. Every bit of it worthy of a philosopher — and every bit of it at war with pleasure. "That is not the pleasure he means." Let him mean whatever pleasure he likes: he plainly means one in which virtue has no share. And come — if we misunderstand his pleasure, do we misunderstand his pain as well? So I say it plainly: a man who measures the greatest evil by pain has no business even mentioning virtue.
And certain Epicureans — the best of men, truly; no breed is less spiteful — complain that I argue against Epicurus out of partisanship. As if he and I were competing for some office or honor! I place the highest good in the mind; he places it in the body. I place it in virtue; he in pleasure. And it is they who do the fighting — who actually cry out to the neighbors for help, and plenty of them come flying at the call. I am the one who says I am not troubled about it: whatever they settle, I will count the matter settled.
After all, what is this — a debate over the Punic War? Even on that question Marcus Cato thought one thing and Lucius Lentulus another, yet there was never a quarrel between them. These people run far too hot — especially since the doctrine they are defending is hardly a courageous one: not one they would dare argue in the senate, before the assembly, before the army, or in front of the censors. But I will deal with them some other time, and in this spirit: I will set up no contest, and when they speak the truth I will yield without a fight. One warning only. Even if it were perfectly true that the wise man refers everything to the body — or, to put it more decently, does nothing except what is expedient and measures everything by his own advantage — since positions like that win no applause, let them hug their delight in private and give up the grand talk.
There remains the view of the Cyrenaics, who hold that grief arises when something has happened unexpectedly. Unexpectedness does matter greatly, as I said above — and I know Chrysippus thought so too: what has not been foreseen strikes with more force. But it is not the whole story. True, an enemy's sudden arrival throws things into rather more confusion than an expected attack; a sudden storm at sea terrifies sailors more than one they have watched building; and most such cases run the same way. But examine the nature of the unexpected carefully and you will find nothing more than this: everything sudden seems bigger — and for two reasons. First, no time is given to weigh how great the thing that has happened really is. Second, when it seems the blow could have been guarded against had it been foreseen, the evil looks like something contracted by our own fault — and that makes the grief bite sharper.
That this is so, time proves. As time moves forward it softens grief so thoroughly that, with the very same evils still in place, grief is not merely eased but in most cases lifted away entirely. Many Carthaginians lived as slaves in Rome, and many Macedonians after King Perseus was captured; and when I was a young man in the Peloponnese, I saw some Corinthians too. Every one of them could have raised that same lament from the Andromacha — "All this I saw..." — but perhaps they had long since sung it out. By their faces, their speech, and everything else in their bearing and carriage, you would have taken them for men of Argos or Sicyon. Indeed, the ruins of Corinth, coming suddenly into view, moved me more than they moved the Corinthians themselves, whose minds long reflection had covered over with the callus of time.
I have read the book Clitomachus sent to his fellow citizens after the destruction of Carthage, to console them in their captivity. In it is written out a disputation of Carneades, which Clitomachus says he had copied into his notebook. The question was set like this: that it appears the wise man will be in grief when his country is captured — and Carneades's arguments against that claim are all recorded. So strong a medicine, then, does the philosopher bring to a fresh calamity — a medicine nobody even asks for once the calamity has aged. Had that same book been sent to the captives a few years later, it would have found not wounds to treat but scars. For pain fades gradually, step by step as it goes — not because the situation itself changes, or ever could, but because experience teaches what reason ought to have taught: that the things which looked so large are smaller than they seemed.
Then what need is there, someone will ask, for reasoning at all — or for any of the consolation we usually offer when we want to ease the pain of people in mourning? For on this theory we always have one remedy ready to hand: nothing ought to seem unexpected. But how will a man bear his misfortune any better for knowing that such things must happen to human beings? Talk of that kind subtracts nothing from the sum of the evil; it only reports that nothing has happened which should not have been anticipated. And yet speech of that kind is not without power to console — in fact, I suspect it may have the most power of all. So no: those unexpected blows do not carry such force that all grief springs from them. They strike harder, perhaps; but they do not make what happens seem greater. It seems greater because it is fresh, not because it is sudden.
There are two roads, then, to finding the truth — not only about things that seem evil, but about things that seem good as well. Either we investigate the nature of the thing itself, what kind of thing it is and how large — as we sometimes do with poverty, whose load we lighten in argument by showing how small and how few are the things nature actually requires — or we set fine-spun argument aside and turn to examples. Here Socrates is brought forward, here Diogenes, here that line of Caecilius:
Often there is wisdom even under a dirty little cloak.
For since poverty has one and the same force for everyone, what possible reason can be given why Gaius Fabricius found it bearable while others insist they cannot bear it?
Like this second road is the style of consoling that teaches that what has happened is simply the human lot. An argument of that kind does more than deliver knowledge of the human condition; it signals that what others have borne, and are bearing, can be borne. Is poverty the subject? Many patient poor men are recalled. Is it the scorning of public honors? Then men who never held any are brought forward — and were happier for that very reason — and the lives of those who preferred private leisure to public business are praised name by name. Nor is silence kept over that anapaest — a chanted verse — of the mightiest of kings, who praises an old man and calls him fortunate because he will come to his last day without glory and without fame.
In the same way, by rehearsing examples, the consolers bring forward the losses of children too, and the mourning of those who take it hardest is softened by the examples of others. What the rest of mankind has endured makes what has happened to us seem far smaller than it had been reckoned; and so, little by little, as people think it over, it comes into view how much opinion had lied to them. That is what the famous Telamon declares — "When I fathered him, I knew..." — and Theseus — "I used to rehearse my future miseries in advance" — and Anaxagoras — "I always knew my child was mortal." All these men, from long reflection on human affairs, had come to understand that such things are not remotely as dreadful as the crowd's opinion makes them. And it seems to me that much the same thing happens to those who think troubles through in advance as happens to those whom time heals — except that a kind of reasoning cures the first, while nature herself cures the second, once they have grasped the point that holds the whole matter together: that the evil which opinion had declared the greatest of all is by no means great enough to overturn a happy life.
What follows, then, is that the blow lands harder for being unforeseen — not, as those others suppose, that when the same misfortune befalls two men, only the one it caught by surprise feels grief. In fact, some mourners are said to have taken their sorrow even harder for hearing about the common condition of mankind — that we are born under this law, that no one can stay exempt from evil forever. That is why Carneades, as I see our own Antiochus writes, used to criticize Chrysippus for praising these lines of Euripides:
No mortal lives whom pain and sickness never touch. Many must bury their children and beget others in their place; death is the end marked out for all. These things bring anguish to the human race in vain: earth must be given back to earth, and then, for all, life must be harvested like grain. So Necessity commands.
Carneades denied that talk of this kind did anything at all to lighten grief. The very fact, he said, that we have fallen under so cruel a necessity is itself a thing to grieve over; and a speech built on recounting other people's evils is suited to consoling the spiteful, not the sorrowing. To me it seems far otherwise. The necessity of bearing the human condition forbids us, so to speak, to pick a fight with god, and reminds us that we are human — a thought that goes a long way toward lightening sorrow. And the parade of examples is brought in not to entertain the malicious, but so that the man in mourning may conclude that he can bear what he sees so many others have borne with moderation and calm.
For men who are collapsing, who cannot hold themselves together under the sheer weight of grief, must be propped up by every means there is. That is why Chrysippus thinks grief itself got its Greek name, lype, as if it were a dissolving — a coming apart — of the whole man. And the whole of it can be torn out by the roots once the cause of grief has been laid open, as I said at the start; for the cause is nothing but opinion — the judgment that a great evil is present and pressing down. So it is that bodily pain, whose bite is the sharpest of all, is endured when there is hope of good ahead; and a life lived honorably and brilliantly brings so much consolation that men who have lived that way are either never touched by grief at all, or feel only the lightest prick of the soul's pain. But when to this opinion of great evil there is added the further opinion that grieving is proper — that it is right, that it is part of one's duty, to take what has happened hard — then, and only then, you get grief's full, crushing disorder.
From that opinion come all the varied and detestable forms of mourning: the unwashed squalor, the womanish clawing of cheeks, the blows to breast and thighs and head. That is where you get Homer's Agamemnon — and Accius's too — "tearing, in his grief, again and again at his unshorn hair." Which drew that joke from Bion the philosopher: the foolish king tore out his hair in mourning as if baldness would relieve sorrow.
But men do all these things believing they are supposed to be done. So Aeschines attacks Demosthenes for offering sacrifices on the seventh day after his daughter's death. And with what rhetoric, what abundance! What maxims he piles up, what words he hurls! — you learn from it that a rhetorician may get away with anything. No one would approve a word of it if we did not have this planted in our minds: that every good man ought to mourn the death of his own people as bitterly as he can. This is why some men, in the soul's pains, hunt out solitude — as Homer says of Bellerophon:
who wandered, wretched and grieving, over the Aleian plains, eating his own heart, shunning the tracks of men —
and why Niobe is imagined as turned to stone, I suppose for her everlasting silence in grief, while Hecuba, they think, was pictured as changed into a dog because of a certain bitterness and fury of soul. And there are others who, in their grief, often love to talk to solitude itself, like the nurse in Ennius:
A longing has seized me now, poor wretch, to cry out to heaven and to earth the miseries of Medea.
All this men do in their pain because they believe it right, true, and owed. And that it is done from a kind of verdict about duty shows most clearly in this: if mourners who mean to stay in mourning happen to do something a little more human, or say something a little more cheerful, they haul themselves straight back to misery and accuse themselves of a fault for letting the grieving lapse. Mothers and teachers actually punish children — not with words only, but with beatings — if, while the household is in mourning, they do or say anything too lighthearted; they force them to cry. And what of this: when the mourning finally slackens, and a man realizes that his grieving accomplished nothing — doesn't that fact alone prove the whole thing was voluntary?
What about the man in Terentius who "punishes himself" — the Self-Tormentor, the Heauton Timorumenos of the play's title?
I have resolved, Chremes, that so long as I stay miserable I do my son less wrong.
This man resolves to be miserable. And does anyone resolve on anything against his will? "Indeed, I would count myself deserving of any evil —": he counts himself deserving of evil unless he is miserable. You see, then, that the evil lies in opinion, not in nature. And what of the cases where the facts themselves forbid mourning? In Homer, the daily slaughter and the deaths of so many bring a kind of settling of sorrow. There it is said:
For far too many fall, and every single day, before our eyes; no one could ever be free of mourning. The fairer course is to commit the slain to their graves with a firm mind, and close our grief with one day's tears.
So it is in our power to throw off pain when we choose, to suit the occasion. And is there any occasion — given that the thing really is in our power — that we should not seize for laying down the burden of grief? It was well known that the men who watched Gnaeus Pompeius fall under his wounds — fearing for their own lives at that most bitter and pitiable sight, because they saw themselves ringed by the enemy's fleet — did nothing at that moment except urge on the rowers and make their escape; only after they reached Tyre did they begin to grieve and lament. Fear, then, was able to push grief away from them — and true reason and wisdom will not be able to? What could do more to make a man lay down his sorrow than realizing that it gains nothing and was taken up in vain? But if it can be laid down, it need never have been taken up. It must be admitted, then, that grief is taken up by choice and by judgment.
The point is confirmed by the patience of those who have already been through a great deal: they bear whatever happens more easily, and consider themselves hardened against fortune — like the man in Euripides:
If this dark day had been the first to dawn on me, if I had not sailed so long on such a sea of troubles, there would be reason for anguish — as a colt panics at the bridle's sudden, unfamiliar touch; but misery has broken me in, and I have gone numb.
Since, then, sheer weariness of miseries makes griefs gentler, we are forced to conclude that the thing itself is not the cause and source of the sorrow.
Consider the greatest philosophers — the ones who have not yet attained wisdom. Don't they understand that they stand in the greatest evil? For they are unwise, and there is no evil greater than unwisdom. Yet they do not go into mourning. Why not? Because to that class of evils no one attaches the opinion that it is right and fair, and a matter of duty, to be distressed that you are not wise — whereas we do attach that opinion to the grief that involves mourning, which is the greatest grief of all.
So Aristotle, taking the older philosophers to task for supposing that philosophy had been brought to perfection by their own talents, says they must have been either very foolish or very vain; but that he himself can see that, since so great an advance had been made in a few years, philosophy would be entirely finished in a little while longer. And Theophrastus, dying, is said to have accused nature of giving stags and crows a long life, which meant nothing to them, and human beings, to whom it mattered most, so short a one. If men's span could have been longer, he said, every art would have been perfected and human life furnished with every kind of learning; he complained, in other words, that he was being snuffed out just as he had begun to see these things. And of the rest of the philosophers — doesn't every one of the best and most serious admit that he is ignorant of many things, and that many things remain for him to learn, and learn again?
And yet, though they understand that they are stuck fast in the very middle of folly — and nothing is worse than that — they are not crushed by grief, because no opinion of obligatory pain gets mixed in. And what of those who hold that mourning is simply not for men? Such as Quintus Maximus, who buried a son who had been consul; Lucius Paulus, who lost two sons within a few days; Marcus Cato, whose son died as praetor-elect; and the others I gathered in my Consolation.
What calmed these men, except their conviction that mourning and sorrow have no place in a man? So the very thing that others surrender to, thinking it right, these men drove off, thinking it disgraceful — from which we see that grief lies not in nature but in opinion. Against all this the other side argues: Who is so insane as to grieve of his own free will? Pain comes from nature, they say — and your own Crantor, they remind us, holds that we must yield to it; it presses, it bears down, it cannot be resisted. So Oileus in Sophocles, who had once consoled Telamon over the death of Ajax, was shattered when he heard of the death of his own son. Of his changed mind the poet says:
No man was ever furnished with wisdom so great that he can ease another's hardship with his words and not — when fortune shifts and swings her attack against him — break under his own sudden blow, while all the fine precepts he spoke to others fall away.
When they argue this way, what they are trying to establish is that nature cannot be resisted at all. And yet the same men admit that people take on heavier griefs than nature compels. What madness is that, then? — the very question we put right back to them. But there are, in fact, several reasons for taking up pain.
First comes that opinion of evil: once the evil is seen and believed in, grief follows of necessity. Second, people imagine that they gratify the dead by mourning them hard. And on top of that comes a certain womanish superstition: they suppose they will square accounts with the immortal gods more easily if, struck by the gods' blow, they confess themselves beaten down and laid flat. But most people never notice how these beliefs contradict one another. They praise a man who dies with an even mind — and then think a man who bears another's death with an even mind deserves blame. As if it could possibly happen, whatever lovers like to say to each other, that anyone loves another person more than himself.
It is a noble thing — and, if you ask, right and true as well — to love those who ought to be dearest to us as much as we love ourselves. But more than ourselves? That simply cannot be done. Nor is it even to be wished for in friendship that my friend love me more than he loves himself, or that I love him more than I love myself; if that were the rule, life and every duty in it would be thrown into confusion. But of that another time. For now it is enough not to blame our misery on the loss of those we love — not to love them more than they themselves would wish, if they could feel anything, and certainly not more than we love ourselves. As for the claim that most people get no relief at all from consolations — with the addendum that the consolers themselves admit to being miserable the moment fortune wheels her attack onto them — both points come apart easily. These are faults not of nature but of the people themselves; and folly can be accused at any length you like. Those who refuse relief are inviting their own misery, and those who bear their own misfortunes otherwise than they prescribed for everyone else are no worse than most of mankind — no worse than the greedy who blame the greedy, or the glory-chasers who find fault with the vainglorious. For it is the special property of folly to see other people's vices and forget its own.
But surely the point to press hardest is this: since it is agreed that grief is removed by the passage of time, the power at work is not the passing day itself but prolonged reflection. If the thing is the same and the man is the same, how can anything about the pain change, when nothing has changed either in what he grieves over or in the one who grieves? What cures the pain, then, is thinking long and steadily that there is no evil in the thing — not the mere length of time. At this point they offer me their "moderate griefs." But if such moderation is natural, what need is there of consolation at all? Nature herself will set the limit. And if it rests on opinion, then let the whole opinion be removed. I think enough has now been said to show that grief is an opinion that an evil is present — an opinion which includes the belief that taking up grief is one's duty.
To this definition Zeno the Stoic rightly adds that the opinion of present evil must be fresh. But his school interprets that word like this: "fresh" does not mean only what happened a short while ago; as long as a certain force remains in that imagined evil — as long as it stays vigorous and keeps a kind of greenness — so long it counts as fresh. Take Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus, king of Caria, who built that famous tomb at Halicarnassus. As long as she lived, she lived in mourning, and in the end she wasted away, consumed by it. For her, that opinion was fresh every single day; and an opinion stops being called fresh only when it has dried out with age. These, then, are the duties of a consoler: to remove grief down to the roots; or to quiet it; or to draw off as much of it as possible; or to hold it down and keep it from spreading further; or to divert it onto other things.
Some think the consoler has one duty only: to show that the thing is no evil at all — that is Cleanthes' position. Some argue that it is no great evil — the Peripatetics. Some lead the attention away from evils and toward goods — Epicurus. Some think it enough to show that nothing unexpected has happened — the Cyrenaics. And Chrysippus holds that the chief thing in consoling is to remove from the mourner the opinion that by grieving he is discharging a just and owed duty. There are also those who gather all these methods into one, since different people are moved in different ways — as I threw more or less all of them into a single consolation in my Consolation; for my soul was swollen, and I was trying every treatment on it there. But in diseases of the soul, no less than in those of the body, the right moment must be chosen — like Prometheus in Aeschylus, who, when told,
And yet, Prometheus, I believe you hold to this: that reason has the power to heal an angry heart,
replied:
Yes — if it applies its medicine at the ripe moment, and does not press a hand against the wound and make it worse.
So in consolations the first medicine will be to show that the evil either does not exist or is very small; the second, to speak of the common condition of life and, more particularly, of whatever concerns the mourner's own case; the third, to show that it is the height of folly to wear yourself out with grief that accomplishes nothing, once you understand that nothing can be gained. As for Cleanthes — he is consoling the wise man, who needs no consoling. If you convince a mourner that nothing is evil except what is base, you have removed not his grief but his folly — and it is the wrong hour for a lesson. Besides, Cleanthes seems to me not to have seen this clearly enough: that grief can sometimes arise from the very thing that Cleanthes himself admits is the greatest evil. What shall we say of the time when Socrates, as the story has come down to us, convinced Alcibiades that he amounted to nothing as a man — that between Alcibiades, born to the highest rank, and any porter there was no difference at all? Alcibiades went to pieces; in tears, he begged Socrates to give him virtue and drive the baseness out of him. What shall we say to that, Cleanthes? That there was no evil in the thing that was afflicting Alcibiades with such grief?
And what about those remarks of Lycon's? Trying to thin grief down, he says it is stirred up by small things — by setbacks of fortune and of the body, not by evils of the soul. What then? Wasn't the thing Alcibiades grieved over made precisely of the soul's evils and vices? As for Epicurus's brand of consolation, enough was said earlier.
Nor is that other consolation the most solid — though it is in common use and often does some good: "You are not the only one." It does good, as I say, but not always and not for everyone; there are people who spit it back. What matters is how it is applied: you must dwell on how men who bore such things wisely bore them, not on what blow each sufferer happens to have taken. Chrysippus's method is the soundest as regards truth, but hard to apply in the hour of grief; it is a large undertaking to prove to a mourner that he mourns by his own judgment, and because he thinks he ought to. So then — just as in court we do not plead every case on the same issue (that is our name for the classes of dispute), but fit the pleading to the occasion, to the nature of the controversy, and to the person — so in easing grief you must consider what treatment each patient can accept.
But somehow or other the talk has wandered from the question you set. You had asked about the wise man — a man to whom nothing can look like an evil if it is free of baseness, or at most like an evil so small that wisdom buries it until it is scarcely visible; a man who adds nothing to grief by way of opinion, and does not judge it right to torture himself to the limit and let mourning grind him down — than which nothing could be more depraved. Still, our reasoning has taught us, I think — even though the question whether anything is evil except what can also be called base was not, strictly, the question of this hour — that whatever evil there is in grief comes not from nature, but is contracted by a voluntary judgment and an error of opinion.
And the kind of grief we have treated is the greatest kind of all, so that once it is removed, we should hardly think it necessary to hunt down remedies for the rest. There are stock things that are said about poverty, and stock things about a life without office and without glory; there are set lectures on exile, on the ruin of one's country, on slavery, on infirmity, on blindness — on every stroke that carries the name of calamity. The Greeks split these up into separate lectures and separate books; they are looking for work to do — though the discussions, I admit, are full of delight.
And yet, just as doctors, in curing the whole body, treat even the smallest part that hurts, so philosophy, once it has removed grief as a whole, removes as well whatever particular trouble may show itself from any quarter — if poverty bites, if disgrace stings, if exile spreads its darkness, or if any of the things I just mentioned appears. Each of them has its own proper consolation, and you shall hear them whenever you wish. But we must come back to the same fountain: grief stands far from the wise man because it is empty, because it is taken up for nothing, because it springs not from nature but from judgment — from opinion, from a kind of standing invitation to grieve, once we have decreed that grieving is the thing to do.
Subtract that — the part that is entirely voluntary — and grief, the mourning kind, will be gone; yet a sting will remain, a certain small tightening of the soul. Let them call that natural, if they like, as long as they keep off it the name of grief — that grave, ugly, deadly thing which cannot possibly exist alongside wisdom or, so to speak, live under the same roof with it. But the roots of grief — how many they are, and how bitter! Even with the trunk brought down, every one of them must be picked out, by a separate discussion for each if it comes to that. Leisure for the work, whatever kind of leisure it is, is one thing I still have. But one principle underlies all griefs, though the names are many. Enviousness is a grief; so are rivalry and disparagement, pity and anguish, mourning, sorrow, tribulation, lamentation, worry, pain, vexation, torment, despair.
The Stoics define all of these; and the words I have listed each belong to a different thing — they do not, as they seem to, mean the same, but differ from one another in some degree, as perhaps I will take up elsewhere. These are those fibers of the roots I spoke of at the beginning, all of which must be traced out and pulled, so that not one can ever spring up again. A great and difficult work — who denies it? But what splendid thing is not also steep? Yet philosophy promises to accomplish it, if only we accept her treatment. So much, then, for this. The rest stands ready for you, whenever you wish, both here and anywhere else.
There are many places, my dear Brutus, where I find myself marveling at the talent and virtue of our countrymen, but nowhere more than in those studies which they took up very late, and carried into this city from Greece. From the city's first beginnings, the institutions of the kings — and in part the laws — had established the auspices, the religious rites, the assemblies, the right of appeal, the council of the fathers, the ranking of cavalry and infantry, the whole business of war: all of it set up as if by a divine hand. And then, once the republic was freed from the rule of kings, the advance our people made toward every kind of excellence was astonishing, its pace beyond belief. This is not the place to talk about the customs and institutions of our ancestors, or the discipline and fine balance of the state; I have treated all that carefully enough elsewhere, above all in the six books I wrote On the Republic.
But here, thinking about the pursuit of learning, I keep running into reasons to believe that these studies too were not merely fetched from abroad and taken up — they were preserved and cultivated. For our ancestors had, almost within eyeshot, Pythagoras, a man of towering wisdom and nobility, who was in Italy in the very years when Lucius Brutus — the illustrious founder of your own noble line — set his country free. And as the teaching of Pythagoras flowed far and wide, it seems to me it seeped into this city as well. Conjecture makes that likely, and certain surviving traces point the same way. For who could seriously believe that while Greek Italy — the region called Great Greece — was flourishing with its greatest and most powerful cities, and while in those cities the name first of Pythagoras himself and then of the Pythagoreans stood so tall, our people kept their ears closed to those most learned voices?
In fact, I suspect it was sheer admiration for the Pythagoreans that led later generations to decide that King Numa must have been a Pythagorean himself. They knew the teaching and the way of life of Pythagoras; they had received from their ancestors the memory of that king's fairness and wisdom; but the ages and dates had blurred with the passing of time. So they concluded that a man who stood out for wisdom must have been a student of Pythagoras. So much for conjecture. As for actual traces of the Pythagoreans — I could collect plenty, but I will use only a few, since that is not today's business. The Pythagoreans, it is said, used to hand down certain teachings in verse, somewhat under a veil of secrecy, and used to bring their minds down from hard thinking to calm with singing and the lyre. And Cato, the weightiest of authorities, says in his Origins that our ancestors kept this custom at their banquets: the guests at table would take turns singing, to the flute, the praises and great deeds of famous men. From which it is clear that there were already songs set for the voice, and poems.
The Twelve Tables say as much, showing that songs were being composed even then — for the law made it an offense to compose one to another man's harm. And here is another proof that those were not uneducated times: the lyre played at the sacred couches of the gods and at the banquets of the magistrates, a practice belonging to the very school I am speaking of. To my ear, even the poem of Appius Caecus, which Panaetius praises so warmly in a letter of his to Quintus Tubero, has a Pythagorean sound. Many other things in our institutions are drawn from the Pythagoreans too; I pass over them, so that we won't seem to have learned from others the very things we are credited with inventing.
But to bring the discussion back to its point: in how short a time, and what a crowd of poets — and what poets! — and what orators, sprang up among us! Plainly our people could master anything, the moment they decided they wanted to. Of the other studies I will speak elsewhere if there is need, as I often have already. The pursuit of wisdom is genuinely old among us; even so, before the age of Laelius and Scipio I can find no one I am able to name by name. When those two were young, I find Diogenes the Stoic and Carneades the Academic being sent by the Athenians as ambassadors to our senate — men who had never touched public affairs, one of them from Cyrene, the other from Babylon; they would surely never have been pulled out of their lecture halls and chosen for that mission unless some of our leading men, in those days, had cared about learning. Those men put other things down in writing — some the civil law, some their own speeches, some the records of our ancestors — but this grandest art of all, the discipline of living well, they pursued more in how they lived than in what they wrote.
And so of that true and elegant philosophy — the one that started from Socrates and lives on still among the Peripatetics, and among the Stoics too, who say the same things in a different way, while the Academics referee their disputes — there are almost no Latin records, or very few. Maybe the subject was too vast; maybe men were too busy; maybe they judged that the untrained simply could not be won over by it. And while they kept their silence, up stood Gaius Amafinius and spoke. When his books came out, the crowd was stirred and flocked to that school above all others — perhaps because it was so easy to grasp, perhaps because pleasure's soft enticements beckoned, or perhaps simply because nothing better had been offered, so people held on to what there was.
After Amafinius, many champions of the same system wrote a great deal, and between them they took over all of Italy. And the strongest evidence that their doctrine has no subtlety — that it is so easily memorized and wins the approval of the unlearned — is exactly what they take to be the pillar of their school. But let every man defend what he thinks; judgment is free. I will hold to my own practice: bound by the rules of no single school that I must obey in philosophy, I will always search out what is most probable in each question as it comes. I have done this often elsewhere, and recently I did it in earnest at my place in Tusculum. So, with the discussions of three days already laid out, this book wraps up the fourth day. When we had walked down to the lower promenade, as we had done on the days before, this is how it went.
"Let anyone who wants," I said, "name the question he'd like argued."
"It doesn't seem to me that the wise man can be free of every disorder of the soul," he began.
"Free of grief, at least, he seemed to be after yesterday's discussion — unless you were only agreeing with us to save time."
"Not in the least. Your argument won me over completely."
"So you don't think grief can touch the wise man?"
"No — I really don't."
"Well then: if grief can't throw the wise man's soul into disorder, nothing can. What else would do it? Fear? But fear is about the very things, still at a distance, that cause grief when they are present; take away grief, and you have taken away fear. That leaves two disorders — exultant delight, and desire. If those can't reach the wise man, his mind will be at peace forever."
"That is exactly how I see it."
"Which would you rather, then? Shall we make sail at once, or row for a while first, like a ship just pulling out of the harbor?"
"What do you mean by that? I don't follow."
"I mean this: when Chrysippus and the Stoics discuss the disorders of the soul, they spend the greater part of their effort carving them up and defining them; the part where they actually treat souls, and keep them from churning, is tiny. The Peripatetics, by contrast, bring plenty for calming the soul, but they skip the thorny work of division and definition. So I was asking whether I should spread the sails of eloquence right away, or first row us out a little with the oars of logic."
"The second — then the whole of what I'm asking will come out more complete, built from both."
"That is the sounder way; and if anything turns out too obscure, you can ask me afterward."
"I will. Though even the obscure parts — you'll lay them out, as usual, more clearly than the Greeks do."
"I'll certainly try. But this needs a taut attention: let one piece slip away, and the whole thing may scatter."
So I began. What the Greeks call pathe — the passions — we prefer to name disorders of the soul rather than diseases. In explaining them I will follow first that old division of Pythagoras', and then Plato's. They split the soul into two parts, one sharing in reason, the other without it. In the part that shares in reason they place tranquility — that is, a calm and quiet steadiness. To the other part they assign the churning motions of anger and of desire, the opposites and enemies of reason.
Let that stand as our spring. Still, in mapping these disorders let us use the definitions and divisions of the Stoics, for on this question they seem to me to work with the sharpest edge. Zeno's definition runs like this: a disorder — what he calls a pathos — is a movement of the soul turned away from right reason, against nature. Some put it more briefly: a disorder is an appetite grown too violent — "too violent" meaning one that has strayed too far from nature's steadiness. The kinds of disorder, they hold, spring from two imagined goods and two imagined evils, making four in all. From the goods come desire and delight — delight over good things present, desire toward good things to come. From the evils come fear and grief — fear of evils on their way, grief over evils here; for the same things whose approach we fear weigh us down with grief when they arrive.
Delight and desire both turn on the opinion that something is good. Desire is lured and set alight and swept off toward whatever looks good; delight is carried away and exults when it has already seized something it craved. For by nature all of us chase what looks good and shy away from its opposite; the instant anything appears that seems good, nature herself pushes us to go and get it. When that reaching happens steadily and sensibly, the Stoics call it boulesis; let us call it will. Will, they say, is found only in the wise man, and they define it so: will is what wants a thing in accordance with reason. But the reaching that is whipped up too violently, in defiance of reason — that is desire, craving with the bridle off, and it is found in every fool.
Likewise, when we are moved so as to come into some good, it happens in one of two ways. When the soul is moved calmly and steadily, in step with reason, that is called joy. But when it leaps up with an empty, spilled-over excitement, that is wild or excessive delight, which they define as an elation of the soul without reason. And since nature makes us reach for good things, nature likewise makes us swerve from evils. When that swerve is made with reason, let it be called caution — and let it be understood to exist only in the wise man. When it is made without reason, with a low, broken cowering of spirit, let it be named fear. Fear, then, is caution that has turned its back on reason.
Present evil does not touch the wise man at all; grief over it belongs to fools, who are afflicted over evils they only imagine, and who let their souls sink and shrink in disobedience to reason. So the first definition is this: grief is a shrinking of the soul in defiance of reason. Four disorders, then, and three steadinesses — since grief alone has no steadiness set against it. But all the disorders, they insist, come about by judgment and by opinion. And so they define them more tightly still, to show not only how faulty the disorders are, but how completely they lie within our power. Grief is a fresh opinion of a present evil, in which it seems right for the soul to sink and shrink. Delight is a fresh opinion of a present good, in which being carried away seems right. Fear is an opinion of an impending evil that seems unbearable. Desire is an opinion of a good on its way — one it would pay to have here, present, right now.
But the judgments and opinions I have named are not the whole of it. The disorders, they say, do not consist in those alone, but also in what the disorders produce: grief inflicts a kind of bite of pain; fear, a certain retreat and flight of the soul; delight, a spilling-over merriment; desire, an unbridled grasping. And the "opining" that I built into all the definitions above, they hold to be a weak assent.
Under each single disorder, several species of the same family are ranged. Under grief: enviousness — I use the rarer word here for teaching's sake, since "envy" applies not only to the one who envies but also to the one who is envied — rivalry, jealousy, pity, anguish, mourning, sorrow, tribulation, pain, lamentation, worry, vexation, torment, despair, and whatever else belongs to the same brood. Under fear are ranged sluggishness, shame, terror, dread, panic, fainting, confusion, alarm. Under pleasure: malice, which delights in another's misfortune; enchantment; boastfulness; and the like. Under desire: anger, flaring temper, hatred, feuding, discord, neediness, longing, and everything else of that stamp.
And they define these as follows. Enviousness, they say, is grief taken on at another man's good fortune — good fortune that does the envier no harm at all. (For if a man grieves at the success of someone who is hurting him, he is not rightly said to envy — Agamemnon does not envy Hector. It is the man whom another's advantages injure not one bit, and who aches anyway to see the other enjoy them, who truly envies.) "Rivalry" is used in two senses, one for praise and one for blame: the imitation of virtue is called rivalry — though we have no use for that sense here, for it belongs to praise — and rivalry is also the grief felt when someone else has gotten the thing you craved, and you go without. Jealousy — the thing I want understood by the Greek zelotypia — is grief that someone else, too, has gotten the very thing you craved for yourself.
Pity is grief at the misery of another who suffers wrongfully (for no one is moved to pity by the punishment of a man who killed his father or betrayed his country). Anguish is grief that presses down. Mourning is grief at the bitter death of someone who was dear. Sorrow is grief with tears; tribulation, grief with hardship; pain, grief that tortures; lamentation, grief with wailing; worry, grief with brooding thought; vexation, grief that lingers; torment, grief that batters the body along with it; despair, grief without any expectation of better things.
What is ranged under fear, they define this way. Sluggishness is fear of work to come. Terror is fear that strikes the body a blow — hence blushing follows shame, while pallor and trembling and chattering teeth follow terror. Dread is fear of an evil drawing near. Panic is fear that knocks the mind from its seat, as in that line of Ennius:
Then panic drove all wisdom from my stricken breast.
Fainting is the fear that follows on panic like its companion; confusion, the fear that scatters one's thoughts; alarm, the fear that lasts.
The species of pleasure they describe like this. Malice is pleasure in another's misfortune that brings no gain to yourself. Enchantment is pleasure that seduces the soul through sweetness of hearing; and as this pleasure of the ears works, so do the pleasures of the eyes, of touch, of smell, of taste — all of one family, pleasures melted down, as it were, to be poured over the soul. Boastfulness is pleasure that struts and gloats and carries itself too insolently.
What is ranged under desire, they define this way. Anger is the desire to punish a man who seems to have done you an unjust injury. Flaring temper is anger at its birth, just now springing into being — what the Greeks call thymosis. Hatred is anger grown old. Feuding is anger watching for its moment of revenge. Discord is a bitterer anger, conceived in the innermost heart and core. Neediness is desire that cannot be filled. Longing is the desire to lay eyes on someone who is not yet here. And they draw one more distinction: desire attaches to the things said of a person or persons — what the logicians call kategoremata, "predicates" — such as having riches or winning office; neediness is for the things themselves, for the office, for the money.
The fountain of all the disorders, they say, is the loss of self-control: a defection of the whole mind from right reason, so far turned from reason's prescription that the appetites of the soul can no longer be governed or reined in at all. Just as self-control calms the appetites, makes them obey right reason, and keeps safe the mind's considered judgments, so its enemy — self-control's collapse — inflames, churns, and whips up the whole state of the soul. From it are born griefs and fears and every other disorder.
Just as diseases and sicknesses arise in the body when the blood is corrupted or phlegm or bile runs over, so a tangle of depraved opinions, warring among themselves, strips the soul of its health and racks it with disease. Out of the disorders come, first, the diseases — what the Stoics call nosemata — along with their opposites, which involve a faulty recoil, an aversion and disgust toward particular things; then the sicknesses, arrostemata in the Stoic vocabulary, with their contrary aversions likewise set against them. At this point the Stoics — Chrysippus above all — spend far too much labor matching the diseases of the soul, point for point, to the diseases of the body. Let us skip all that talk, which is hardly necessary, and handle what actually carries the argument.
Understand this much, then: a disorder is opinion tossing itself about — restless, turbulent, always in motion. But when that fever and boiling of the soul has grown old, when it has settled, so to speak, into the veins and the marrow, then disease appears, and sickness, and the aversions that stand opposed to those diseases and sicknesses. What I am describing can be separated in thought, though in reality the things are tangled together; and they spring from desire and from delight. Suppose money is craved, and reason — a kind of Socratic medicine to heal the craving — is not brought in at once. The evil seeps into the veins and lodges deep in the gut; there stand disease and sickness, and once they have aged, they cannot be torn out. And that disease's name is greed.
The other diseases arise the same way: the hunger for glory; woman-chasing, if I may coin a name for what the Greeks call philogynia; and all the rest of the diseases and sicknesses on the same pattern. Their opposites are thought to be born of fear — hatred of women, for instance, such as fills Atilius' play The Woman-Hater; or hatred of the whole human race, which we hear of in Timon, the one they call the Misanthrope — the man-hater; or the horror of guests. All these sicknesses of the soul are born from a certain fear of the things people flee and hate.
Sickness of the soul they define as a vehement opining about a thing not worth pursuing, as though it were richly worth pursuing — an opining stuck fast and planted deep. What springs from aversion they define like this: a vehement opinion, stuck fast and planted deep, about a thing not worth fleeing, as though it had to be fled. And this opining is a judging that you know what you do not know. Under sickness fall such things as greed, ambition, woman-chasing, pig-headedness, gluttony, drunkenness, a weakness for delicacies, and whatever resembles them. Greed is a vehement opinion about money — that it is richly worth pursuing — stuck fast and planted deep; and the definitions of the rest are built on the same frame.
The aversions are defined in this style: the horror of guests is a vehement opinion, stuck fast and planted deep, that a stranger is a thing to be fled; and in the same way are defined the hatred of women, like Hippolytus', and the hatred of humankind, like Timon's. Now, to come to the analogy with bodily health — I will use the comparison from time to time, though more sparingly than the Stoics do. Some men lean toward certain diseases more than others; that is why we call some people cold-catchers and others colicky, not because they are sick now but because they often are. In the same way, some lean toward fear, others toward some other disorder. So in some people we speak of anxiety — hence "the anxious" — and in others of an angry streak. An angry streak differs from anger: it is one thing to be quick-tempered, another to be angry — just as anxiety differs from anguish, for not everyone who sometimes feels anguish is anxious, nor are the anxious always in anguish; and just as being drunk differs from being a drunkard, and being a ladies' man differs from being in love. This leaning of different people toward different diseases stretches wide, for it touches every one of the disorders.
It shows in many vices too, though the thing has no name of its own. So people are called envious, malicious, timid, or pitying because they lean toward those disorders, not because they are always swept away by them. This leaning, each toward its own kind, may be called "sickness" on the analogy of the body — so long as we understand by it a leaning toward getting sick. In good things — since some people are more apt for one good than another — let it be called aptness; in bad things, proneness, to signal a slide toward falling; where a thing is neither good nor bad, let it keep the former name. Now, just as the body has its disease, its sickness, and its defect, so has the soul. Disease they call a corruption of the whole body; sickness, disease joined with weakness; defect, when the parts of the body are at odds with one another — from which come misshapen limbs, twisting, deformity.
So the first two, disease and sickness, arise when the health of the whole body has been shaken and churned up; a defect shows by itself even while health is intact. But in the soul we can pry disease apart from sickness only in thought. Viciousness, on the other hand — vice as a settled state — is a condition or disposition inconsistent through a whole life, at odds with its own self. So it happens that one corruption of opinions produces disease and sickness, while the other produces inconstancy and self-contradiction. For not every vice involves parts at war: the condition of those who stand not far from wisdom is indeed at odds with itself, so long as it remains unwise, but it is not twisted, not deformed. Diseases and sicknesses are parts of viciousness; but whether the disorders are parts of it too — that is a question.
For vices are conditions that stay put, while the disorders are conditions in motion — so they cannot be parts of something that stands still. And just as the body's likeness to the soul holds for what is bad in each, so it holds for what is good. The body has its prize qualities: beauty, strength, health, firmness, speed. The soul has its own. When the elements we are made of are in balance with one another, the body is called healthy; and the soul, likewise, is called healthy when its judgments and opinions agree with one another — and that agreement is the virtue of the soul. Some say this virtue simply is self-control; others say it is a quality that obeys the precepts of self-control and follows in its train, with no distinct form of its own. Either way, only the wise man has it. There is also, though, a certain everyday health of soul that even a fool can enjoy — when a doctor's treatment clears the disturbance out of his mind.
And as a certain graceful proportion of the limbs, joined with a certain sweetness of coloring, is called beauty in the body, so in the soul an evenness and steadiness of opinions and judgments, joined with a certain firmness and stability — either following virtue or containing the very force of virtue in itself — is called beauty too. Likewise the soul's powers are named, in matching words, after the body's strength, its sinews, its effectiveness. Speed of body is called swiftness, and the same praise goes to the intellect, for the way a mind can run through many things in a short time. Souls and bodies do differ in one respect: a strong soul cannot be attacked by disease at all, while a strong body can. And bodily injuries can happen without any fault of ours; the soul's cannot — every one of its diseases and disorders comes from treating reason with contempt. That is why they exist only in human beings. Animals do things that look similar, but they do not fall into disorders.
Between sharp minds and dull ones there is this difference: the gifted, like Corinthian bronze, which is slow to take tarnish, fall into disease more slowly and recover more quickly; not so the dull. Nor does a gifted mind fall into every disease and disorder — never into any that are savage and monstrous. Some disorders even wear, at first sight, a look of humanity: pity, grief, fear. But the sicknesses and diseases of souls are thought harder to tear out than those supreme vices which stand opposite the virtues. Vices can be removed while the diseases remain, because the diseases are not healed as quickly as the vices are removed.
There you have what the Stoics work out, kernel by kernel, about the disorders — the part they call "logic," because the arguing is so fine-grained. And now that my talk has sailed clear of those jagged reefs, let me hold course through the rest of the discussion — provided I have been clear enough, given how dark the subject is.
"Perfectly clear," he said. "If anything needs closer study, we can go looking another time. Right now we're waiting for those sails you spoke of, and for open water."
Well then. As I have said of virtue elsewhere, and will often have to say again — for most of the questions that touch life and conduct are drawn from virtue's spring — since virtue, I say, is a steady and harmonious disposition of the soul, one that makes the people who have it praiseworthy, and is itself praiseworthy on its own account, apart from any usefulness, out of it flow honorable intentions, opinions, and actions, and all right reason — indeed, the shortest possible definition of virtue is right reason itself. The opposite of this virtue is viciousness. I prefer that word to "malice" for what the Greeks call kakia, because malice is the name of one particular vice, while viciousness covers them all. And out of viciousness the disorders are stirred up — those turbid, agitated motions of the soul I described a little while ago, turned away from reason, the sworn enemies of the mind and of a tranquil life. They bring in anxious, bitter griefs; they crush the soul and cripple it with fear; and they also set it on fire with excessive craving — the thing we call sometimes desire, sometimes lust — a helplessness of the soul as far from self-control and moderation as anything can be.
If this craving ever does get what it wanted, it is so carried away with excitement that "nothing it does holds steady," like the man who declared that "excessive pleasure of the soul is the greatest of all errors." The cure for these evils lies in virtue, and in virtue alone. And what is not only more miserable, but uglier and more deformed, than a man crushed by grief, crippled, flat on the ground? Right next door to that misery stands the man who dreads some evil on its way and hangs suspended, breathless. To express the force of this evil, the poets imagine a boulder hanging over Tantalus in the underworld, "for his crimes, his unbridled spirit, and his boastful tongue." That is folly's common sentence: over everyone whose mind revolts from reason there hangs, always, some terror of the kind.
And as grief and fear are the wasting disorders of the mind, so the two merrier ones — desire, forever greedily reaching for something, and empty excitement, that is, exultant joy — are not far from outright madness. Which lets you see what sort of person it is we call at one moment moderate, at another modest and temperate, at another steady and self-restrained; sometimes we like to gather all these labels under the single head of "frugality." If that word did not contain the virtues within it, it would never have become so common that it now has the standing of a proverb: "the frugal man does everything right." When the Stoics say the same thing about the wise man, they are thought to be talking too wonderfully, too magnificently.
So then: whoever, through moderation and steadiness, is at rest in his soul and at peace with himself — so that he neither wastes away with troubles nor breaks under fear; neither burns with thirsty desire, reaching for something, nor melts into futile, giddy excitement — he is the wise man we are looking for; he is the happy man. To him nothing in human affairs can look unbearable enough to cast his soul down, or delightful enough to send it soaring. For what could look big in human affairs to a man who knows all eternity and the size of the whole universe? What, in human ambitions, in the tiny brevity of this life, can look big to the wise man — whose soul stands sentry at all hours, so that nothing can come at him unforeseen, nothing unexpected, nothing new at all?
And this same man directs so keen a gaze in every direction that he always sees a station, a place for living free of trouble and strangling worry, so that whatever blow fortune drives at him, he takes it fittingly and calmly. And whoever does that will be free not only of grief but of all the other disorders too. A soul empty of them makes men perfectly, completely happy; a soul stirred up and dragged away from whole and certain reason loses not just its steadiness but its health. That is why the Peripatetics' theory — and their rhetoric — must be judged soft and nerveless. They say that souls must, of necessity, be disturbed; they only add a certain limit past which the disturbance ought not to go.
A limit — you set a limit to vice? Or is it no vice to disobey reason? Does reason not teach plainly enough that nothing is truly good which you should crave with burning heat, or swagger insolently over once you have it; that nothing is truly evil which should flatten you, or drive you half out of your mind with the effort of not being flattened; and that all these things that look too grim or too glorious look so through error? And if that error shrinks in fools with the passage of time, so that though the thing itself stays the same they bear an old trouble very differently from a fresh one — then surely it ought not to touch the wise man at all?
Besides, what exactly will this limit of theirs be? Let us hunt for the limit of grief, since that is where most of the labor gets spent. There is a passage in Fannius saying that Publius Rupilius took it hard when his brother was defeated for the consulship; but he clearly went past the limit, because it cost him his life. He ought, then, to have borne it more moderately. Fine — suppose he was bearing it moderately, and then the death of his children was added. "A new grief would arise, but a moderate one." Still, a great addition. Then add severe bodily pain, the loss of his property, blindness, exile. If each new evil brought its own added grief, the sum would be one no man could carry.
The man who goes looking for a limit to vice is doing what a man does who believes that someone who has flung himself off the cliff of Leucas can stop his fall whenever he pleases. He cannot — and no more can a disturbed soul, once launched, hold itself back or halt where it chooses. And as a general rule, whatever is destructive as it grows is vicious at its birth;
and grief and the rest of the disorders, once they have swollen, are certainly pestilent — so from the moment they are let in, they already stand well inside the plague. They drive themselves forward once reason has been left behind; weakness indulges itself, sails blindly out into deep water, and finds no place to stand. So it makes no difference whether these men approve of moderate disorders or of moderate injustice, moderate cowardice, moderate intemperance. Whoever sets a limit to vices signs on for a share of the vices — which is hateful in itself, and the more troublesome because vices stand on a slope: once set moving, they slide on down, and there is no way to stop them.
And what about this: those same Peripatetics say the disorders — which we hold must be torn out root and branch — are not only natural, but were given to us by nature for our good? Their speech runs like this. First they spend a great many words praising hot temper. Anger, they say, is the whetstone of courage; angry men charge an enemy, or a corrupt citizen, with far more vehemence. The little calculations of the other sort weigh nothing — men who reason, "this battle is a just one; it is fitting to fight for our laws, for liberty, for our country." Such thoughts have no force unless courage has caught fire with anger. Nor is their argument confined to fighting men: no command is stern enough, they think, without some bitterness of anger; and as for the orator, they will not accept him prosecuting — will not even accept him defending — without the stings of anger. Even if the anger is not really there, they hold that his words and gestures ought to fake it, so that the orator's delivery may light anger in his listeners. They flatly deny that anyone who does not know how to be angry deserves to be called a man; and what we call gentleness they call, as if it were a defect, mere sluggishness.
Nor is that the only lust they praise — for anger, as I defined it a little while ago, is the lust for revenge. No: they declare that this whole class of lust, or desire, was given by nature for the greatest usefulness, since nobody, they say, can do anything superbly except what he has an appetite for. Themistocles used to walk the public streets at night because he could not sleep, and when people asked why, he answered that the trophies of Miltiades kept jolting him awake. Who has not heard of Demosthenes and his vigils? — the man who said it stung him if any workman's before-dawn industry ever beat his own. And the princes of philosophy itself could never have made such progress in their studies without a blazing desire. Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato — we are told they traveled to the ends of the earth: wherever there was something to be learned, there, they judged, they had to go. Do we suppose any of that could have happened without desire at full burn?
Even grief itself — which we said must be fled from like some foul, monstrous beast — they say nature established to real advantage: so that men in the wrong would hurt when correction, rebuke, and disgrace landed on them. For sinners seem to have won impunity when they can bear disgrace and infamy without pain; better, on this view, to be bitten by conscience. Hence that scene Afranius drew from life: the dissolute son wails, "Oh, wretched me!" and the hard old father answers, "Let him hurt over something — anything, so long as he hurts."
The remaining branches of grief they call useful too: pity, for bringing help and lifting up others who have fallen into undeserved disaster; even rivalry and detraction are not useless, they say — for the man who sees that he has failed to get what another got, or that another has gotten the very thing he has. And fear! — take away fear, they warn, and you take away all the carefulness of life, which runs highest in those who fear the laws, the magistrates, poverty, disgrace, death, and pain. Still, they argue all this while conceding that these feelings should be pruned back; torn out by the roots, they say, they cannot and need not be; and in almost everything, they judge, the middle amount is best. When they lay all that out, do you think they are saying nothing — or something?
"Something, certainly," he said. "So I am waiting to hear what you will answer."
Perhaps I shall find an answer, I said — but first, one thing: do you see how much modesty counts for among the Academics? They say plainly only what bears on the matter. The Peripatetics get their answer from the Stoics; the two of them may cross swords for all I care. My one obligation is to hunt for whatever looks most like the truth. So what turns up in this question from which we can touch something probable — the farthest point the human mind can reach? The definition of a disorder — and Zeno's, I think, is the right one. He defines it this way: a disorder is a movement of the soul against nature, turned away from reason. Or, more briefly: a disorder is a craving grown too vehement — where "too vehement" means one that has strayed far from nature's steadiness.
What could I say against these definitions? Most of them are the work of men who argue shrewdly and sharply; those other phrases — "the fires of souls," "the whetstones of the virtues" — come straight off the rhetoricians' parade float. Can a brave man really not be brave unless his bile starts to rise? That is gladiator talk. Though even in gladiators, mind you, we often see steadiness: "they talk together, they meet, they ask a favor, they make demands" — more the look of men appeased than of men enraged. But fine — in that trade, let there be some Pacideianus with exactly the spirit Lucilius gives him:
"I'll kill him, sure, and win — if that's your question," he says, "but here's how I think it goes: I'll take one in the face before I sink my sword in that thug's gut and lungs. I hate the man. I fight angry. And nothing feels longer than the wait while the other fits his sword to his hand — that's how far my rage runs, my fury and my hatred of him."
But without any of this gladiators' anger, look at Ajax in Homer, striding out in high good cheer to fight Hector to the finish. The moment he took up his arms, his very stride poured joy into his comrades and terror into the enemy — Hector himself, just as Homer paints him, trembling through his whole chest, was sorry he had ever issued the challenge. And these two talked together, gently and quietly, before they closed — and even in the fight itself did nothing angry, nothing rabid. Nor do I believe that the first Torquatus, the man who earned that surname, was in a rage when he stripped the torque from the Gaul; nor that Marcellus was brave at Clastidium because he happened to be angry.
As for Africanus — whom we know better, since the memory of him is fresher — I could all but swear an oath: he was not on fire with anger when he covered Marcus Allienius the Paelignian with his shield in the battle line and drove his own sword into the enemy's chest. About Lucius Brutus I might allow a doubt — whether his bottomless hatred of the tyrant made him charge Arruns with the reins off; I notice, after all, that each fell to the other's thrust at close quarters. Why, then, do you drag anger into this? Does courage have no drive of its own unless it starts to go insane? What of Hercules, whom that very courage you insist on calling anger lifted into heaven — do you suppose he was angry when he closed with the Erymanthian boar or the Nemean lion? Or Theseus — was he in a fury when he took the Marathonian bull by the horns? Consider instead that courage has nothing rabid in it at all, and that hot temper is shallowness through and through. There is no such thing as courage without reason.
"Human affairs are to be looked down on; death is to be disregarded; pains and toils are to be counted bearable." Once these convictions are fixed by judgment and settled decision, then you have that robust, stable courage — unless we are to suspect that everything done with vehemence, keenness, and spirit is done in anger. To my mind, not even the famous Scipio, the pontifex maximus — Rome's chief priest — the man who proved true that Stoic saying that the wise man is never a private citizen, was angry with Tiberius Gracchus that day when he left the consul dithering and, private citizen though he was, gave the order as if he held the consulship himself: "Whoever wants the commonwealth safe, follow me."
Whether I myself ever did anything brave in public life, I cannot say; but if I did, I certainly did not do it in anger. Is anything more like insanity than anger? Ennius put it perfectly when he called anger "the beginning of madness." The color of the face, the voice, the eyes, the breathing, the total loss of command over words and actions — what trace of health is in any of that? What is uglier than Homer's Achilles in the quarrel, or his Agamemnon? Ajax, for that matter, anger drove all the way to madness and death. So courage does not need to call in anger as its counsel; it comes sufficiently equipped, prepared, and armed on its own. By that logic we might as well call drunkenness useful to courage — madness too, since the insane and the drunk often do a great many things with more than usual vehemence. Ajax was always brave, but bravest in his frenzy; for
He did his greatest deed when the Greeks were breaking: his one hand hauled the whole cause back.
He turned the battle around — out of his mind. Shall we say, then, that madness is useful? Work through the definitions of courage: you will see it has no need of temper. Courage, then, is "a disposition of the soul obedient to the highest law in enduring what must be endured"; or "the stable keeping of one's judgment in facing and repelling the things that look terrifying"; or "the knowledge of what is terrifying, what is its opposite, and what is to be wholly disregarded — a knowledge that keeps one's judgment about all of them stable"; or, more briefly, with Chrysippus (the earlier definitions were Sphaerus's, a man the Stoics rank among the very best framers of definitions; they are all much alike, really, but they bring out our common notions some better than others) — how does Chrysippus put it? "Courage," he says, "is the knowledge of things that must be borne, or a disposition of the soul in suffering and enduring which obeys the highest law, without fear." We may harry these men all we like, the way Carneades used to; I am afraid they may be the only philosophers. For which of those definitions fails to unwrap the notion of courage that each of us carries around, covered and folded away? And once it is unwrapped, who would ask anything more for the fighter, the commander, or the orator — or imagine that none of them can act bravely without going rabid?
And the Stoics — the ones who say every unwise man is insane — don't they reach these same conclusions? Take the disorders away, hot temper above all, and their claim will sound like the talk of monsters. But in fact their argument goes like this: all fools are mad, they say, the way all muck stinks — not at every moment. Stir it, and you will smell it. Just so, the hot-tempered man is not angry at every moment; provoke him, and you will watch him rave. And this warrior anger of theirs — when it comes home, what is it like with the wife? With the children? With the household? Is it useful there too? Is there, in short, anything a disturbed mind can do better than a steady one — and can anyone even be angry without disturbance of mind? So our countrymen chose their word well: though every vice is a fault of temperament, they kept the name "temperamental" for angry men alone, because no vice is uglier than hot temper.
As for the orator, anger suits him least of all — feigned anger is another matter; that is not unbecoming. Or do you imagine I am angry whenever I say something in court with unusual sharpness and heat? What about afterward, when the business is over and done with and I am writing the speeches out — am I angry as I write? "Is anyone paying attention to this? Bind him!" Do you think Aesopus ever played a scene angry, or that Accius was angry when he wrote one? Such passages are performed splendidly — better by an orator, if he really is an orator, than by any actor — but they are performed evenly, with a tranquil mind. And praising lust — what kind of wantonness is that? You produce Themistocles and Demosthenes for me; you throw in Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. What — do you call study a lust? Studies, even of the best things, like the ones you cite, ought to be settled and tranquil. And praising grief, the one supremely detestable thing — what philosophers, please, do that? Afranius, granted, put it neatly: "Let him hurt over something — anything, so long as he hurts." But he said it of a ruined and dissolute young man; our question is about a steady and wise one. Let the centurion keep that anger of yours, or the standard-bearer, or the others it is better not to name — no need to lay open the rhetoricians' trade secrets. For a man who cannot use reason, it is useful to use emotion; but we, as I keep testifying, are asking about the wise man.
"But rivalry is useful too, and detraction, and pity." Why pity a man rather than help him, if help is in your power? Or can we not be generous without pitying? We are not obliged to take griefs upon ourselves on other people's account; our obligation is to lift grief off other people, if we can. And detraction — or that vicious rivalry that looks like two suitors circling — what use is there in either, when the rival's lot is to be tormented by another's good because he lacks it himself, and the detractor's to be tormented by another's good because someone besides himself has it too? Who could approve of that — choosing to grieve over a thing rather than exert yourself, if it is a thing you want? And wanting to be its only possessor is the summit of derangement.
And "moderate amounts" of evils — who can rightly praise that? Can anyone with lust or desire in him be anything but lustful and desirous? Anyone with anger in him, anything but angry? With anguish in him, anything but anguished? With fear in him, anything but fearful? Is this, then, our verdict on the wise man — lustful, angry, anguished, afraid? His excellence could be described at any length and breadth you like, but the shortest way is this: wisdom is the knowledge of things divine and human, the understanding of the cause of each thing; from which it follows that wisdom imitates what is divine and counts everything human as lower than virtue. And this is the nature into which you told me disturbance seemed to fall, the way storms fall on an open sea? What is there that could shake such gravity, such steadiness? Something unforeseen, something sudden? What of that kind can happen to a man who has thought out in advance everything that can happen to a human being at all? As for their claim that the excess should be pruned away and the natural part left — tell me, what can be natural that is also capable of being excessive? All of these growths spring from the roots of error, and roots of error are not for clipping and trimming. They must be plucked up and pulled out whole.
But since I suspect you are asking not so much about the wise man as about yourself — him you already grant to be free of every disorder; you want to be — let us see how much strength there is in the remedies philosophy applies to the diseases of the soul. For there is a medicine, certainly. Nature has not been so spiteful toward the human race, so much its enemy, as to devise all those healing aids for our bodies and none at all for our souls. In fact she has treated souls even better, because the body's helps have to be brought in from outside, while the soul's health is enclosed within the soul itself. But the greater and more divine the soul's excellence is, the more care it demands. Reason well applied sees what is best; reason neglected tangles itself in error after error.
So from here on, everything I say must be aimed at you. You pretend to be asking about the wise man, but perhaps you are really asking about yourself. Now, the disorders I have laid out have various cures. Not every grief is soothed the same way: the mourner needs one medicine, the pitier another, the envier another. And across all four disorders there is a further choice to make — whether the treatment is better aimed at disorder as such, the scorning of reason, an appetite grown too violent, or at the particular kinds, fear, lust, and the rest; and whether you should argue that the thing which set off the grief is not really worth taking hard, or should work to remove grieving altogether. If a man takes it hard that he is poor, do you argue that poverty is no evil, or that a man ought not to take anything hard? Surely the second is better. For if you happen to fail to persuade him about poverty, you have to let him keep his grief; but if you remove grief itself, by the proper arguments we used yesterday, the evil of poverty is, in a way, removed along with it.
Any disorder of the soul of this kind can indeed be washed away by the soothing method — by teaching that the thing which gives rise to delight or lust is not a good, and the thing which gives rise to fear or grief is not an evil. But the sure cure, the one proper to the disease, is to teach that the disorders themselves are vicious in their own right — that there is nothing natural about them and nothing necessary. So we see grief itself soften when we reproach mourners with the weakness of an unmanned, effeminate soul, and when we praise the gravity and steadiness of those who bear the human lot without turbulence. And that treatment tends to work even on people who think these things are genuine evils but hold that they should be borne with a calm mind. One man thinks pleasure is the good; another, money; yet the first can still be called back from intemperance, and the second from greed. The other line of argument — the one that removes the false opinion and draws off the grief in the same motion — is certainly the more useful; but it rarely succeeds, and it is not a treatment for the general public.
And there are some griefs that this medicine cannot touch at all. Suppose a man is in distress because he has no virtue in him, no spirit, no sense of duty, no moral goodness: what is strangling him really is evil. He needs a different treatment brought to him — and it happens to be a treatment that all the philosophers can supply, however much they quarrel with one another about everything else. For they must all agree on this: motions of the soul that have turned against right reason are vicious. Even if the things that stir fear or grief really are evils, and the things that stir desire or delight really are goods, the motion itself is still vicious. What we mean by a great-spirited and brave man is someone steady, settled, grave, looking down on everything merely human — and nobody can be that man while he is mourning, or fearing, or craving, or exulting. Those states belong to people who have decided that the outcomes of human affairs are bigger than their own souls.
That is why all the philosophers, as I said before, have one method of cure: say nothing about what kind of thing it is that has disturbed the soul; speak only about the disturbance itself. Take desire first. When the whole job is to remove it, there is no point asking whether the thing that provokes the lust is good or not — the lust itself is what has to go. So whether the highest good is moral goodness, or pleasure, or the two joined together, or those famous three classes of goods, even if what a man wants too violently is virtue itself, the speech that talks him down should be the same in every case. And human nature, set squarely in view, contains everything needed to calm the soul; to bring the picture into sharper focus, the common condition and the law of life should be spread out in the telling.
So it was not for nothing that Socrates, when Euripides was staging his Orestes, is said to have called for the first three lines to be spoken again:
No tale is so terrible to tell, no evil sent by chance or by the anger of heaven, that human nature cannot bear it and endure.
And for persuading a man that what has happened can be borne, and ought to be, it is very useful to count off the people who have borne it. Though in fact the calming of grief was laid out both in yesterday's discussion and in my book of Consolation, which I wrote in the middle of mourning and pain — for I was not a wise man. And I did there the very thing Chrysippus forbids: applying the remedy to the soul's swellings, so to speak, while they are still fresh. I did it. I committed violence against nature, so that the greatness of the pain would give way to the greatness of the medicine.
Next door to grief — and grief has been discussed enough — stands fear, about which a few things must be said. As grief is of present evil, so fear is of evil to come. That is why some have said fear is a certain part of grief, while others have called it pre-distress — the scout, as it were, that leads in the trouble marching behind it. The same reasonings that make present evils bearable make coming evils contemptible; in facing both, we must see to it that we do nothing low, cringing, soft, effeminate, broken, or abject. But although one should speak of fear's own inconstancy, weakness, and shallowness, it helps enormously to pour contempt on the very things that are feared. So it fell out very neatly — whether by chance or by design — that on the first and second days we discussed the two things men fear most, death and pain. If what was said then stands approved, we are in large part set free from fear.
So much for the opinion of evils; now let us look at the opinion of goods — that is, at delight and desire. To my mind, one single fact holds the cause of everything that touches the disorders of the soul: that they are all in our own power, all taken up by judgment, all voluntary. This is the error that must be torn out, the opinion that must be pulled away; and just as with imagined evils the job is to make them more bearable, so with imagined goods it is to take the fever out of whatever is counted great and thrilling. And one rule applies to evils and goods alike: if it proves hard to persuade a man that none of the things which disturb the soul should be counted among goods or among evils, still a different treatment must be fitted to each different motion — the malicious man corrected by one argument, the lover by another, the anxious man by another still, and the timid by yet another.
Anyone following the theory of goods and evils that carries the strongest approval could easily deny that a fool can ever feel delight, since a fool never possesses anything good. But for now we are speaking in the common way. Grant, then, that the things men imagine to be goods really are goods — honors, riches, pleasures, the rest: even so, an exulting, over-leaping delight in obtaining them is disgraceful — just as laughing may be allowed while a cackling guffaw still earns blame. The soul spilling out in delight is the same vice as the soul shrinking in pain; desire shows the same shallowness in the reaching that delight shows in the enjoying; and just as men too crushed by trouble are judged shallow, so, rightly, are men too lifted up by delight. And since envying belongs to grief, and taking pleasure in another's misfortune belongs to delight, both are usually chastened by displaying the savagery, the near-brutishness, in them. And as it is becoming to be cautious but not becoming to be afraid, so it is becoming to feel joy but not becoming to feel delight — since, for teaching's sake, we are keeping delight distinct from joy.
I said earlier that a shrinking of the soul can never be right, while a lifting of it can. The Hector of Naevius rejoices one way:
Glad am I to be praised by you, father — praised by a man men praise.
and the character in Trabea quite another:
The madam, sweetened up with my silver, will be watching for my nod — what I want, what I'm angling for. I arrive, I push the door with a fingertip: it swings wide. Chrysis catches sight of me, all unexpected; she comes flying out to meet me, aching for my embrace. She will give herself to me.
How splendid he thinks all this, he will tell you himself: "I will outrun Fortune herself in fortune."
Anyone who pays close attention will see straight to the bottom of how disgraceful this delight is. And as those men are disgraceful who lift off in delight while they are enjoying the pleasures of sex, so those are scandalous who crave them with an inflamed mind. In fact the whole of what is commonly called love — and, so help me, I cannot find any other name to call it by — is of such shallowness that I can think of nothing to set beside it. Caecilius reckons that whoever does not hold Love the highest of the gods is "either a fool or a man who knows nothing of life" —
a god who holds it in his hand to make whom he pleases mad, whom sane, whom sick, and whom, in turn, be loved, be longed for, be sent for.
O poetry, splendid reformer of human life — seating Love, the sponsor of disgrace and shallowness, in the council of the gods! I am speaking of comedy, which could not exist at all if we did not smile on these debaucheries. But what does the captain of the Argonauts say in tragedy?
You saved me for love's sake, more than honor's.
What then? This love of Medea's — what bonfires of misery it set blazing! And yet in another poet the same woman dares to tell her own father that her husband was
the man Love gave me — Love, who has more power and a stronger claim than any father.
But let the poets have their fun; their fables show us Jupiter himself neck-deep in this same disgrace. Let us come to the masters of virtue, the philosophers, who deny that love is a matter of sex — and over this they pick their quarrel with Epicurus, who, in my opinion, is not lying by much. For what is this "love of friendship" of theirs? Why does nobody fall in love with an ugly young man, or with a handsome old one? The custom looks to me to have been born in the gymnasia of the Greeks, where such loves run free and licensed. So Ennius said it well:
Baring bodies among fellow citizens — that is where disgrace begins.
Even granting that such lovers stay chaste, which I see is possible, they are still anxious and tormented — and the more so precisely because they hold themselves in and rein themselves back.
And — to pass over the love of women, to which nature has granted a wider license — who has any doubt what the poets mean by the rape of Ganymede? Who fails to grasp what Laius, in Euripides, is saying and wanting? And what have the most learned men, the greatest poets, published about themselves in their own poems and songs? Alcaeus was known in his own commonwealth as a brave man — and look what he writes about the love of young men. Anacreon's poetry is love poetry from end to end. And Ibycus of Rhegium, his writings make plain, burned with this love beyond them all. Loves of lust, all of them, as we can see. And then we philosophers turned up — with our own Plato at our head, whom Dicaearchus blames, and not unjustly — to lend love our authority.
The Stoics go further: they say the wise man will actually love, and they define love itself as "an effort to form a friendship, arising from the appearance of beauty." If there exists anywhere in nature a man who loves without anxiety, without longing, without care, without sighing — very well, let him love; he is free of all lust, and lust is what this discussion is about. But if there is a love — and there certainly is — that stands barely a step from insanity, or not even a step, like the lover's in the Leucadia:
If only there were any god at all who cared what became of me —
— as though every god in heaven ought to be busy arranging how this fellow can enjoy his sexual pleasure! "Oh, unlucky me!" Nothing truer. And the other character has it exactly right: "Are you in your senses, wailing away like that?" So even to his own people he looks insane. And then what tragedies he stages!
Holy Apollo, bring me help! And you I call, all-powerful Neptune! And you above all, you Winds!
He thinks the whole universe should drop everything and turn to relieving his love. Venus alone he shuts out, as unfair to him: "Why should I call on you, Venus?" She is too deep in lust, he says, to care about anything — as though it were not lust that has him doing and saying such disgraceful things himself.
For a man in this condition, then, the treatment is this. Show him how flimsy the thing he craves is, how contemptible, how utterly worthless — how easily it can be had elsewhere, or had another way, or done without altogether. Sometimes he must also be drawn off to other pursuits — studies, concerns, cares, business; often he must be treated by a change of place, like a sick man who is not yet getting his strength back.
Some even think an old love should be driven out by a new one, the way one nail drives out another. But above all he must be warned what a raging madness love is. Of all the disorders of the soul, not one is more violent; so that even if you decline to indict the acts themselves — the seductions, the corruptions, the adulteries, incest itself at the end of the line, the ugliness of every one of them standing ready for indictment — even setting all that aside, the disorder of the mind in love is foul in its own right.
For pass over the parts of it that are sheer madness: how much shallowness there is in just the parts that pass for ordinary!
Affronts, suspicions, feuds, and truces, war — then peace again! Try to fix these shifting things by fixed reason, and you will get no further than if you set yourself to go insane by rule.
This inconstancy, this whipsawing of the mind — who would not be scared off by its sheer crookedness? And here too we must demonstrate what is said of every disorder: that none exists except by opinion, except by judgment, except by choice. If love were natural, everyone would love, and love always, and love the same thing; shame would not scare off one man, reflection another, and plain satiety a third.
As for anger — for as long as it has the mind in disorder, there is no doubting it is insanity. Under anger's shove even brothers come to a quarrel like this one:
"Was there ever a man alive whose impudence outstripped yours?" "Was there ever one whose malice outstripped yours?"
You know what follows: insults of the heaviest kind hurled between the brothers in alternating lines, so that you recognize them at once for the sons of Atreus — the Atreus who sits plotting an unheard-of punishment for his own brother:
Some greater bulk, some greater evil must I brew to bludgeon and crush that bitter heart of his.
And where does that bulk come bursting out? Hear Thyestes:
My own brother urges me — wretch that I am — to grind my sons between my jaws.
He is serving him his children's flesh. For where will anger not go? Exactly where madness goes. And so we say, quite properly, that angry men have gone out of their own power — that is, out of the power of counsel, of reason, of mind; for these ought to hold power over the whole soul.
With such men, either the targets of their attack must be got out of reach until they collect themselves — and what is collecting yourself but herding the scattered parts of the soul back into their proper places? — or they must be begged and pleaded with, if they hold some power of revenge, to put it off to another time, until the anger simmers down. And "simmering down" plainly admits that a heat had been kindled in the soul against reason's will. Which is why that saying of Archytas is praised: having grown rather angry at his farm steward, "How would I have dealt with you," he said, "if I were not angry!"
Where, then, are the people who call hot temper useful — can insanity be useful? — or natural? Can anything be according to nature that happens with reason fighting against it? And if anger were natural, how would one man be angrier than another? How would the lust for revenge ever let go before it had revenged itself? How would any man repent of what he had done in anger — as we see King Alexander did, who, after he had killed his dear friend Clitus, could barely keep his hands off himself, so great was the force of his remorse? Knowing all this, who can doubt that this motion of the soul, too, is wholly a matter of opinion, and voluntary? And who could doubt that the soul's sicknesses — greed, say, or the craving for glory — arise from setting a high price on the very thing that is making the soul sick? From which we ought to understand that every disorder, likewise, lies in opinion.
And if confidence — that is, a firm trust in one's own soul — is a kind of knowledge, the weighty opinion of a mind that does not assent rashly, then fear is a mistrust in the face of an expected and impending evil; and if hope is the expectation of good, fear must be the expectation of evil. So fear, and the rest of the disorders with it, consist in evil. Therefore, as steadiness belongs to knowledge, disorder belongs to error. And people who are called angry or pitying or envious by nature are simply constituted with a kind of bad health of the soul — yet curable even so, as is told of Socrates. When Zopyrus, who claimed he could read any man's nature from his looks, had piled a whole heap of vices on Socrates in front of a crowd, the rest laughed him down, since they could find no such vices in Socrates; but Socrates himself came to his rescue, saying that those vices really had been planted in him — and that he had thrown them out by reason.
So, just as a man who appears in the finest health may still be naturally more prone to some particular disease, one soul leans toward one set of vices and another toward others. And in those who are called vicious not by nature but by their own fault, the vices stand on false opinions about good and evil things, so that one man is more prone to this motion and disorder, another to that. But entrenchment, as in the body, is harder to drive out than a mere disturbance: a sudden swelling of the eyes is cured quickly; a long-standing inflammation takes far more to shift.
But now that the cause of the disorders stands discovered — all of them arise from judgments of opinion, from acts of will — let this discussion have its limit. This much, though, we ought to know: now that the ends of goods and evils have been found, as far as man can find them, nothing greater or more useful can be asked of philosophy than what we have been discussing on these four days. To the contempt of death, and to pain made lighter for the bearing, we have added the calming of grief — and man has no greater evil than grief. For though every disorder of the soul is heavy, and differs little from outright madness, still, when others are in the grip of some disorder — of fear, of delight, of desire — we usually say only that they are stirred up and disturbed; but the ones who have handed themselves over to grief we call miserable, afflicted, wretched, ruined.
So it seems to be no accident, but your own reasoned design, that we discussed grief separately from the other disorders; for in grief sits the fountain and head of all miseries. But the cure of grief, and of all the soul's other diseases, is one cure: they are all matters of opinion, all voluntary, all taken up because taking them up seems right. That error — the root, as it were, of every evil — philosophy promises to pull out whole.
Let us hand ourselves over to philosophy, then, to be cultivated, and let ourselves be healed. As long as these evils sit lodged in us, we cannot be happy — we cannot even be well. So either let us deny that reason accomplishes anything, when in truth nothing can be done rightly without reason; or else, since philosophy is built of the marshaling of reasons, let us — if we want to be good, and to be happy — seek from her every aid and every help toward living well and living happily.
This fifth day, my dear Brutus, will bring our Tusculan Disputations to a close — the day we debated the doctrine you approve above all others. For I have seen clearly, both from the book you wrote for me with such care and from many of our conversations, how firmly you are persuaded that virtue is sufficient by itself for a happy life. Hard as that is to prove, given the many and varied torments fortune can inflict, it is the kind of truth we must labor over, so that the proof comes easier. For of all the subjects philosophy handles, there is none that is stated with greater weight or greater magnificence.
Consider what drove the first men who gave themselves to the study of philosophy: they set everything else aside and devoted their whole lives to searching out the best condition of life, and surely it was the hope of living happily that made them invest so much care and effort in the pursuit. If virtue was discovered and perfected by them, and if there is protection enough in virtue for a happy life, then who could fail to think the work of philosophizing gloriously founded by them and well taken up by us? But if virtue is subject to accidents various and uncertain — fortune's handmaid, without strength enough to defend herself — then I fear that our hope of a happy life should rest not so much on confidence in virtue as on prayers.
Indeed, when I turn over in my mind the blows with which fortune has so violently exercised me, I begin at times to distrust this doctrine, and to dread the weakness and fragility of the human race. For I fear that nature, having given us feeble bodies and fastened to them incurable diseases and unbearable pains, may have given us souls to match — souls that share the body's pains and are tangled, besides, in anguishes and troubles all their own.
But here I correct myself. I am judging the strength of virtue from the softness of others, and perhaps from my own — not from virtue herself. For she — if only there is such a thing as virtue, and your uncle Cato removed that doubt, Brutus — holds everything that can befall a human being beneath her. Looking down from that height, she despises human accidents; and being free of all fault, she judges that nothing but herself is any concern of hers. But we, who enlarge every approaching evil with fear and every present one with grief, prefer to condemn the nature of things rather than our own error.
Yet the correction of this fault, and of all our other vices and wrongs, must be sought from philosophy. Into her lap my own will and eagerness drove me from my earliest years; and now, under these heaviest of blows, tossed by a great storm, I have fled for refuge to the same harbor from which I first set out. O philosophy, guide of life! O seeker of virtue and banisher of vice! What would we — what would human life itself — have been without you? You gave birth to cities; you called scattered human beings together into the fellowship of common life; you joined them to one another, first by settled homes, then by marriage, then by the shared bond of letters and speech. You were the inventor of laws; you were the teacher of morals and discipline. To you we fly for refuge, from you we beg help; and to you, as once in great part, so now wholly and completely, I give myself over. One single day lived well, in obedience to your precepts, is worth more than an immortality of doing wrong.
Whose resources should I draw on, then, if not yours — you who have granted us tranquility of life and lifted from us the terror of death? Yet philosophy, far from being praised as her services to human life deserve, is neglected by most people and actually reviled by many. To revile the parent of life! Does anyone dare stain himself with what amounts to parricide — dare be so impiously ungrateful as to accuse the very one he ought to revere, even if he lacked the wit to appreciate her? But this error, I suppose — this fog spread over untaught minds — comes of their being unable to look far enough back: they never imagine that the men who first equipped human life were philosophers.
The thing itself, we can see, is exceedingly ancient; only the name, we admit, is recent. And who could deny that wisdom itself is ancient in name as well as in fact? Among the ancients it earned that most beautiful name through the knowledge of things divine and human, of the beginnings and causes of everything. So the famous Seven, the men the Greeks called sophoi, were both considered and called wise men by our people; so, many generations earlier, was Lycurgus, in whose time Homer too is said to have lived, before this city of ours was founded; and so, back in the heroic ages, were Ulysses and Nestor — men who both were wise and were reputed to be.
Nor would tradition tell us that Atlas holds up the sky, or that Prometheus was nailed to the Caucasus, or that Cepheus was set among the stars with his wife, his son-in-law, and his daughter, had not their more-than-human knowledge of the heavens carried their names over into the error of fable. After them, all who devoted their studies to the contemplation of nature were considered and called wise men, and that name flowed down all the way to the age of Pythagoras. Pythagoras — as Heraclides of Pontus writes, a pupil of Plato and a deeply learned man — is said to have come to Phlius and to have discoursed learnedly and at length on certain subjects with Leon, the leading man of the Phliasians. Leon, admiring his intelligence and his eloquence, asked him what art he most relied on; and Pythagoras answered that he knew no art at all — he was a philosopher. Struck by the newness of the word, Leon asked what philosophers were, and what set them apart from everyone else.
Pythagoras answered that human life seemed to him like the great fair held at the games — the festival celebrated with the most magnificent shows before a gathering of all Greece. There, some men sought glory and the distinction of a crown with their trained bodies; others were drawn by the profit to be made in buying and selling; but there was one certain kind — and this by far the most free-spirited — who came neither for applause nor for gain, but simply to see, and who studied closely what was being done and how. In the same way, he said, we have come into this life from another life and nature, as if traveling from some other city into the crowded bustle of a fair: some to be slaves of glory, some of money — and a rare few who, counting everything else as nothing, look eagerly and closely into the nature of things. These call themselves lovers of wisdom — for that is what "philosopher" means. And just as at the fair the most gentlemanly thing is to look on while acquiring nothing for oneself, so in life the contemplation and understanding of nature far surpasses every other pursuit.
Nor was Pythagoras merely the inventor of the name; he enlarged the thing itself. When he came to Italy after this conversation at Phlius, he adorned the Greece that was called Great Greece, both in private life and in public, with the most excellent institutions and arts. Of his school there will perhaps be another occasion to speak. But from the old philosophy down to Socrates — who had studied with Archelaus, a pupil of Anaxagoras — the subjects were numbers and motions, the source from which all things arise and into which they fall back; those early thinkers eagerly investigated the sizes of the stars, their distances, their courses, and all things in the heavens. It was Socrates who first called philosophy down from the sky, settled it in cities, brought it even into people's homes, and forced it to ask about life and morals, about good and evil.
His many-sided way of arguing, the variety of his subjects, and the greatness of his genius — immortalized in Plato's memory and Plato's writings — produced several schools of philosophers who disagree among themselves. Of these I have followed, above all, the one I believe Socrates himself used: to keep my own opinion concealed, to relieve others of their errors, and in every discussion to search for what is most like the truth. Carneades kept up this practice with the greatest sharpness and fluency, and I have argued by that same custom often elsewhere, and recently at my place in Tusculum. The talk of the first four days I have already sent you, written out in the earlier books. On the fifth day, when we had taken our seats in the same spot, the question we were to debate was proposed like this.
"It does not seem to me that virtue can be sufficient for a happy life," he began.
"But by Hercules it seems so to my dear Brutus," I said, "and — with your leave — I rank his judgment far above yours."
"I don't doubt it. But the question now isn't how much you love him; it's the nature of this thing I've just stated my view on. That's what I want you to argue."
"So you deny that virtue can be sufficient for a happy life?"
"I deny it flatly."
"But for living rightly, honorably, admirably — in short, for living well — is there protection enough in virtue?"
"Enough, certainly."
"Then can you call a man who lives badly anything but miserable? Or admit that a man lives well and deny that he lives happily?"
"Why couldn't I? Even under torture a man can live rightly, honorably, admirably — and for that reason well — provided you understand what I mean here by 'well.' I mean with steadiness, with dignity, with wisdom, with courage. Those can be thrown onto the rack too; but the happy life doesn't go anywhere near it."
"What then?" I asked. "Is the happy life the only one left standing outside the door and threshold of the prison, while steadiness, dignity, courage, wisdom, and the rest of the virtues are hauled off to the torturer, refusing no punishment and no pain?"
"If you mean to accomplish anything," he said, "you'll have to hunt up something new. That sort of argument doesn't move me in the least — not only because it's shopworn, but much more because, like certain light wines that lose all their strength in water, these Stoic arguments please more in the tasting than in the drinking. Take that chorus of virtues set up on the rack: it puts images of the utmost dignity before your eyes, so that the happy life seems to be hurrying straight toward them, unwilling to let them be abandoned. But once you drag your mind away from that painting, away from those images of the virtues, to the fact and the truth of the matter, this bare question is what remains: can anyone be happy as long as he is being tortured?
"So that is what we should be asking now. And don't be afraid that the virtues will protest and complain at being abandoned by the happy life. For if no virtue exists without practical wisdom, then practical wisdom herself sees this much — that not all good men are also happy. She remembers a great deal about Marcus Atilius, Quintus Caepio, Marcus Aquilius; and if you'd rather deal in images than in realities, it is practical wisdom herself who holds the happy life back as it tries to climb onto the rack, and who declares that it has nothing in common with pain and torture."
"I can easily put up with your arguing this way," I said, "though it's hardly fair of you to prescribe how you'd like me to conduct the case. But let me ask: do we judge that something was accomplished on the previous days, or nothing?"
"Something, certainly — quite a bit, in fact."
"Well, if that's so, then this question is already battered and brought nearly to its end."
"How so, exactly?"
"Because turbulent movements and agitations of the soul, whipped up and carried along by reckless impulse, beat back all reason and leave no part of a happy life standing. Who can fail to be miserable while he fears death or pain — the one so often at hand, the other always hanging over us? And if the same man also fears poverty, disgrace, infamy, as most men do — or crippling weakness, or blindness, or finally slavery, which has befallen not just single men but powerful nations — can anyone who fears all that be happy?
"And what of the man who not only fears these things in the future but bears and endures them in the present? Add to the list exile, mourning, the loss of children. A man broken by such things, crushed under grief — can he possibly be anything but utterly miserable? And again: the man we see inflamed and raging with lusts, snatching at everything with rabid, insatiable desire, thirsting the more fiercely and hotly the more abundantly he drinks in pleasures from every side — wouldn't you be right to call him utterly miserable? And the man carried away by frivolity, exulting in empty delight, strutting for no reason — isn't he the more miserable the happier he thinks himself? So just as these men are miserable, those, on the contrary, are happy: men whom no fears terrify, no griefs gnaw at, no lusts goad, no hollow exultant delights melt into languid pleasures. We recognize the calm of the sea when not even the faintest breeze stirs its waves; in the same way, the soul's state is seen to be quiet and at peace when there is no disorder that could move it.
"If, then, there is a man who counts the power of fortune — who counts everything human, everything that can befall anyone — as bearable, so that neither fear nor anguish can touch him; and if the same man craves nothing and is carried away by no empty pleasure of the soul, what reason is there why he should not be happy? And if virtue accomplishes all this, why should virtue by itself not make men happy?"
"The first point can't be denied," he answered. "Those who fear nothing, are anguished by nothing, crave nothing, and are swept away by no unbridled delight are happy — so I grant you that. As for the second, it is no longer an open question: our earlier discussions established that the wise man is free from every disorder of the soul."
"Then evidently the case is finished," I said. "The question seems to have reached its end."
"Very nearly so, at least."
"And yet that procedure belongs to the mathematicians, not to the philosophers. When the geometers want to demonstrate something, they take whatever bears on it from their previous demonstrations as conceded and proved, and explain only what hasn't been treated before. Philosophers, whatever question they have in hand, gather into it everything relevant, even if they have argued it all out somewhere else. If it were otherwise, why would the Stoic have so much to say when asked whether virtue is sufficient for a happy life? It would be answer enough for him to say that he had already shown that nothing is good except what is right; with that proved, it follows that the happy life is content with virtue — and just as the one follows from the other, so the other follows from it in turn: if the happy life is content with virtue, then nothing is good except what is right.
"Yet that is not how they proceed. They write separate books on the right and on the highest good; and although it follows from the latter that there is force enough in virtue for a happy life, they still treat the point on its own. For every question — above all one this great — deserves to be handled with its own proper arguments and its own encouragements. And make no mistake: philosophy has never uttered a nobler declaration, never made a promise richer or greater. For what does she profess? Good gods! — that she will make the man who obeys her laws armed against fortune forever; that he will have within himself every defense of a good and happy life; in short, that he will always be happy.
"What she actually delivers, I will see to later; in the meantime I set great store by the promise itself. Xerxes, stuffed with every prize and gift of fortune, was not content with his cavalry, his infantry, his multitude of ships, his boundless weight of gold: he offered a reward to anyone who could invent a new pleasure. And he wasn't satisfied with that either — desire will never find its limit. I wish we could coax someone out with a reward of our own: someone to bring us an argument that would make us believe this promise more firmly."
"I wish that too," he said. "But I have one small thing still to ask. I agree that of the propositions you laid down, each follows from the other: just as, if the right is the only good, it follows that the happy life is achieved by virtue, so, if the happy life lies in virtue, nothing is good except virtue. But your Brutus, on the authority of Aristus and Antiochus, doesn't see it that way. He thinks that even if there were some good besides virtue, virtue would still be sufficient for a happy life."
"What then? Do you imagine I'm going to argue against Brutus?"
"As you see fit. It's not my place to set the rules for you."
"What is consistent for each man," I said, "we can settle elsewhere." And I went on.
That very disagreement I had often had with Antiochus, and recently with Aristus, when I stayed at his house in Athens while holding a general's command. To me it seemed that no one could be happy while surrounded by evils; and the wise man could be surrounded by them, if there are any evils of body or of fortune at all. Their side argued as follows — Antiochus has set it down in his books in more than one place: virtue by itself can make a life happy, but not the happiest life possible. Further: most things take their name from their greater part even when some part is missing — strength, health, riches, honor, glory, all judged by their kind, not by their count. So too the happy life, even if it limps in some respect, still earns its name from the far greater part of itself.
There is no great need to pick all this apart now, though it does not seem to me argued with much consistency. For one thing, I do not understand what a happy man could still lack that would make him happier — if anything is lacking, he isn't even happy. For another, as to the claim that each thing is named and judged by its greater part, there are cases where that holds. But these same men grant that there are three classes of evils. Picture a man crushed by every evil of two whole classes — everything in his fortune against him, his body worn down and broken with every pain. Shall we say that such a man falls just a little short of the happy life — never mind the happiest?
This is the burden Theophrastus could not carry. Having once laid it down that floggings, torments, tortures, the ruin of one's country, exile, and the loss of children have great power to make life bad and miserable, he did not dare to talk in a lofty and grand style, since what he actually thought was low and abject. How right he was is not the question; consistent he certainly was. And so I do not usually approve of attacking conclusions once the premises have been granted. Yet this most elegant and most learned of all the philosophers is not much criticized for saying there are three classes of goods; but everyone savages him for the book he wrote on the happy life, in which he argues at length why a man who is being tortured and racked cannot be happy. He is even thought to say there that the happy life does not climb onto the wheel — a Greek instrument of torture. He never says it anywhere in so many words, but what he does say comes to the same thing.
Can I, then, once I have granted a man that bodily pains are evils and that the shipwrecks of fortune are evils, be angry with him for saying that not all good men are happy — when the things he counts as evils can befall any good man? The same Theophrastus is savaged in the books and lecture halls of all the philosophers for having praised, in his Callisthenes, the line:
Fortune, not wisdom, rules the life of men.
No philosopher, they say, ever said anything so spineless. Right enough — but I cannot see how anything could have been said more consistently. For if there are so many goods in the body, and so many outside it, hanging on chance and fortune, isn't it consistent to conclude that fortune — mistress of everything external and everything bodily — counts for more than deliberation does?
Or would we rather imitate Epicurus? He often says many splendid things; how consistently they hang together is no concern of his. He praises plain living. Spoken like a philosopher — but that line belongs to Socrates or Antisthenes, not to a man who says pleasure is the final measure of all goods. He denies that anyone can live pleasantly who does not also live honorably, wisely, and justly. Nothing could be weightier, nothing more worthy of philosophy — had he not measured that very "honorably, wisely, justly" by pleasure. What is better than "fortune scarcely touches the wise man"? But is that said by the man who called pain not only the greatest evil but the only one — a man whose whole body might be crushed by the sharpest pains at the very moment he is boasting loudest against fortune?
Metrodorus said the same thing in even finer words: "I have got there ahead of you, Fortune, and caught you. I have blocked every one of your approaches, so that you cannot come near me." Splendid — if Aristo of Chios had said it, or Zeno the Stoic, who counted nothing an evil except what is shameful. But you, Metrodorus, who have buried all good in your guts and your marrow, who define the highest good as a sound condition of the body and the well-grounded hope that it will last — you have blocked fortune's approaches? How? That good of yours can be stripped from you in an instant.
Yet these are the pronouncements that captivate the untrained; it is because of sayings like these that such men draw their crowds. But the sharp reasoner looks not at what each man says, but at what each man, by his own principles, is bound to say. Take the very position we have adopted in this discussion: we hold that all good men are always happy. Whom I mean by "good men" is plain — those equipped and adorned with every virtue we call sometimes wise men, sometimes good men. Let us see, then, who ought to be called happy.
For my part, I count as happy those who possess good things with no evil mixed in. When we call someone "happy," the word carries no other idea than this: the full and heaped-up possession of good things, with every evil shut out. And virtue cannot reach that state if anything besides virtue itself counts as good. For a whole crowd of evils will come pressing in — if we do count them as evils: poverty, obscurity, low position, loneliness, the loss of loved ones, severe bodily pain, ruined health, weakness, blindness, the destruction of one's country, exile, and finally slavery. The wise man can land in all of these — so many of them, and so great, and still more can happen — because chance brings them on, and chance can strike the wise man. But if these things are evils, who can guarantee that the wise man will always be happy, when he might be caught in every one of them at a single moment?
So I do not easily concede — not to my friend Brutus, not to our common teachers, not to the old masters Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Polemon — that they may count the things I have just listed as evils and still say that the wise man is always happy. If that splendid and beautiful title delights them — a title fully worthy of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato — then let them bring themselves to despise the things whose glitter has captured them: strength, health, beauty, riches, honors, wealth. Let them count the opposites of these as nothing. Then they will be able to declare at the top of their voice that no assault of fortune, no opinion of the crowd, no pain, no poverty frightens them; that everything they have rests within themselves; that nothing they count as good lies outside their own power.
As things stand, there is no way we can allow one and the same man to talk like some great and lofty spirit while counting the very same things good and evil that the crowd does. Stung by the glory of this position, up springs Epicurus, who — heaven help us — also holds that the wise man is always happy. He is captivated by the dignity of the claim, but he would never say it if he listened to himself. For what fits together worse than this: a man who declares pain the greatest evil, or the only evil, and who then supposes that in the middle of torment the wise man will say, "How sweet this is!"? Philosophers are not to be judged by isolated remarks, then, but by the whole sustained run of their thought and its consistency.
"You're bringing me around to your view," he said. "But take care your own consistency isn't found wanting."
"How so?" I asked.
"Because I recently read your fourth book On Ends. Arguing there against Cato, you seemed to me to be trying to show — and to my mind you succeeded — that between Zeno and the Peripatetics there is no difference except novelty of words. If that's so, then if it follows from Zeno's reasoning that virtue has power enough in it for living happily, what possible reason is there why the Peripatetics shouldn't be free to say the same? It's the substance we ought to look at, I think, not the words."
"Now you're dealing with me under sealed documents," I said, "calling witnesses to whatever I once said or wrote. Save that method for people who argue by fixed rules. We philosophers live from day to day: we say whatever strikes our minds as probable, and that is why we alone are free." And I pressed on. Still, since consistency came up a moment ago, I don't think the question in this place is whether the view of Zeno — and of his student Aristo — is true, that the only good is what is right. The question is: granting that view, was it then consistent to rest the whole of living happily on virtue alone?
So by all means let us grant Brutus this much — that the wise man is always happy. How well that squares with his own principles is his business; and who, after all, deserves the glory of that opinion more than he does? Still, let us hold our own ground: the same man is not merely happy but happiest. And if Zeno of Citium — a foreigner, really, and an obscure craftsman of words — seems to have wormed his way into the old philosophy, still the weight of this doctrine should be traced back to the authority of Plato, in whose pages the claim appears again and again that nothing deserves to be called good except virtue.
So in the Gorgias, when Socrates was asked whether he didn't consider Archelaus the son of Perdiccas — then held to be the most fortunate of men — a happy man, he answered, "I have no idea. I've never talked with him."
"Really? There's no other way you could know?"
"None at all."
"Then you can't even say of the great king of Persia whether he's happy?"
"How could I, when I don't know how learned he is, or how good a man?"
"What — you think the happy life rests on that?"
"That is exactly what I think: the good are happy, the wicked are miserable."
"Then Archelaus is miserable?"
"Certainly — if he's unjust."
Doesn't he seem here to rest the whole of the happy life on virtue alone? And what does the same man say in the Funeral Oration? "The man who has everything that makes for living happily anchored in himself alone — whose hopes do not hang on another's good or bad luck, forced to swing and wander with the turns of someone else's fortunes — that man has secured the best plan for living. He is the temperate man, he is the brave man, he is the wise one. As other advantages come to birth and fall away — children above all — he will submit and obey that old precept: he will never rejoice too much and never grieve too much, because he places every hope for himself in himself." From this sacred and august spring of Plato, then, everything I have to say will flow.
And where can we more rightly begin than with nature, the common parent of us all? Whatever she brought forth — not only animals but even the things that spring from the earth and stand on their own stems — she willed to be perfect, each in its own kind. So among trees and vines, and the humbler growths that cannot lift themselves far from the ground, some stay green the year round, while others, stripped bare in winter, warm with the spring and leaf out again; and there is not one of them that is not so quickened by a kind of inner motion, by its own seeds enclosed within it, that it pours out flowers or grain or berries. All of them, in every part, so far as it lies in themselves, are perfect — if no outside force blocks the way.
In animals the force of nature is even easier to see, since nature has given them senses. Some she willed to be swimmers, dwellers in the water; some to be birds, enjoying the freedom of the sky; some to crawl, some to walk; and of these, some to live alone and some in herds; some savage, some tame, and a few hidden away under cover of the earth. And each of them, holding to its own office, unable to cross over into the life of a different creature, stays within nature's law. As each animal has been given by nature some special gift of its own, which it keeps and never abandons, so man has been given something far more outstanding — though "outstanding" should really be said only of things that admit comparison, and the human soul, a cutting taken from the divine mind, can be compared with nothing else — if it is lawful to say so — except God himself.
So if this soul is cultivated, and if its eye is so cared for that errors never blind it, the result is a perfected mind — that is, reason brought to completion, which is the very same thing as virtue. And if everything is happy that lacks nothing, everything that is filled out and complete in its own kind, and if that is the special mark of virtue, then certainly everyone who possesses virtue is happy. On this point Brutus and I agree — which is to say, I agree with Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemon.
But to me such men seem not merely happy but happiest. For what does a man lack for living happily if he trusts in his own goods? And how can a man who distrusts them be happy at all? Yet distrust he must, whoever divides goods into three classes. How will he ever be able to count on the body's strength, or on fortune holding steady? And no one can be happy without a good that is stable, fixed, and lasting. What do those people have that is anything like that? I keep thinking that the Spartan's famous retort fits them — the one he gave a merchant who was boasting of the many ships he had dispatched to every coast: "A fortune that hangs on ropes is not much to wish for." Can there be any doubt that nothing which can be lost belongs in the class of things that fill out a happy life? Of all that the happy life consists of, nothing should be able to dry up, to be snuffed out, to fall away. A man who is going to be afraid of losing any of it cannot be happy.
For we want the happy man to be safe, unassailable, fenced and fortified — furnished not with a little fear, but with none. Just as we call a man harmless not because he does slight harm but because he does no harm at all, so the man to be counted fearless is not the one who fears little but the one who is altogether free of fear. What else is courage but a disposition of the soul that is patient in facing danger and in labor and pain, and stands far removed from all fear? And this certainly would not hold true unless everything good consisted in moral goodness alone.
And that security which everyone most desires and pursues — by security I now mean freedom from grief, the freedom on which the happy life rests — how can anyone possess it who has, or can have, a crowd of evils upon him? And how can a man be lofty and upright, counting everything that can happen to a human being a small thing — which is how we want the wise man to be — unless he judges that everything that matters to him rests in himself? When Philip threatened the Spartans by letter that he would block everything they attempted, they asked whether he was also going to block them from dying. Won't the single man we are looking for be found with that spirit far more easily than an entire city of such men? Now join to this courage we are describing self-control, the governor of every agitation of feeling — and what can be missing for a happy life in a man whom courage rescues from grief and from fear, while self-control calls him back from lust and refuses to let him run riot in exultant high spirits? I would show that virtue accomplishes all this, had it not been laid out on the previous days.
The disorders of the soul make life miserable; their calming makes it happy. And the disorders come in two forms: grief and fear rest on evils merely imagined, while exultant delight and lust rest on a mistake about what is good — and all of them war against deliberation and reason. So when you see a man free, released, unburdened by agitations so heavy, so at cross-purposes and pulling so hard against one another, will you hesitate to call him happy? But the wise man is always in that condition; therefore the wise man is always happy. And further: every good is a thing to rejoice in; what we rejoice in deserves to be proclaimed and openly displayed; what is like that is a thing to glory in; what we glory in is certainly praiseworthy; and what is praiseworthy is surely morally right. Therefore what is good is right.
But the things those people count as goods, even they do not call right. So the only good is what is right — from which it follows that the happy life is held together by moral goodness alone. Things a man can have in abundance and still be utterly miserable ought not to be called goods, or considered goods, at all.
Or do you doubt it? Take a man superb in health, strength, and looks, with the keenest and soundest senses; throw in, if you like, quickness and speed; give him riches, honors, commands, power, glory. If the man who has all this is unjust, without self-control, cowardly, dull-witted or witless outright, will you hesitate to call him miserable? What sort of goods are these, then, which a man can own and still be as miserable as they come? Consider whether the happy life, like a heap built of grains of a single kind, must be built out of parts that resemble it. If so, then happiness must be assembled from goods that are right and nothing else; if the mix is of unlike elements, nothing right can be made from it — and take away the right, and what can you still recognize as happy? For whatever is good is worth seeking; what is worth seeking is certainly worth approving; what you approve you must hold welcome and acceptable; and so it must also be granted dignity. If that is so, it must be praiseworthy. Therefore every good is praiseworthy — from which it follows that what is right is the only good.
If we do not hold that line, there will be a great many things we are forced to call goods. I set riches aside — since anybody, however unworthy, can have them, I do not count them among goods; for what is good is not something just anyone can have. I set aside noble birth and popular fame, whipped up by the consensus of fools and scoundrels. But then even the smallest trifles will have to be called goods: white little teeth, pretty eyes, a pleasing complexion, the qualities Anticlea praises as she washes Ulysses' feet — "gentleness of speech, softness of body." If we count those as goods, what will the philosopher's seriousness have to offer that is any weightier or grander than the opinion of the crowd and the mob of fools?
"But the Stoics call these same things 'preferred' or 'promoted' — the things your people call goods." So they do; but they deny that such things complete a happy life, while the others think no life is happy without them — or, if it can be happy, they flatly deny it can be happiest. We want it happiest, and that famous Socratic chain of reasoning confirms our claim. For this is how the founding master of philosophy used to argue: as each man's soul is disposed, so is the man; as the man himself is, so is his speech; his actions resemble his speech, and his life resembles his actions. Now the disposition of soul in a good man is praiseworthy; therefore the life of a good man is praiseworthy; and therefore right, since it is praiseworthy. From which the conclusion: the life of good men is happy.
And really — in the name of gods and men! — was it not established in our earlier discussions, or were we talking just to amuse ourselves and pass the time, that the wise man is always free of every agitation of soul — what I call the disorders — and that the most tranquil peace always dwells in his mind? A man of self-control, then, steady, without fear, without grief, without any exultant excitement, without lust — is he not happy? But the wise man is always such; therefore he is always happy. And again: how can a good man fail to refer everything he does and everything he feels to the standard of what is praiseworthy? In fact he refers it all to living happily; therefore the happy life is praiseworthy. But nothing is praiseworthy without virtue: therefore the happy life is the work of virtue.
The point can be reached this way as well. In a miserable life there is nothing worth proclaiming or glorying in, and none in a life that is neither miserable nor happy. But there is a kind of life in which something is worth proclaiming, glorying in, holding up for all to see — as Epaminondas boasts:
By my counsels the glory of Sparta was shorn.
And Africanus:
From where the sun rises beyond Maeotis' marshes, no man alive can match my deeds.
If that is so, then the happy life is a thing to glory in, to proclaim, to hold up openly — for there is nothing else that deserves proclaiming and displaying. Grant all this, and you see what follows. Indeed, unless the happy life and the honorable life are one and the same, there must be something better than the happy life — for they will certainly admit that whatever is right is better. So there will be something better than the happy life — and what could be said more upside-down than that? Again: when they grant that vice has force enough to make life miserable, must they not grant that virtue has the same force to make life happy? Opposites have opposite consequences.
At this point I ask what force there is in the famous scales of Critolaus: he sets the goods of the soul in one pan, the goods of the body and external goods in the other, and judges that the first pan sinks so far that it outweighs the earth and the seas together. Then what stops him — or Xenocrates, that weightiest of philosophers, who exalts virtue so high and thins down and throws out everything else — from placing in virtue not only the happy life, but the happiest?
Indeed, if that is not granted, the destruction of the virtues follows. For whoever is open to grief must be open to fear as well — fear being nothing but the anxious expectation of grief to come; and whoever is open to fear is open to dread, timidity, panic, cowardice. So the same man will sometimes be beaten, and will not think that old command of Atreus applies to him:
Let them so arm themselves for life that they know nothing of defeat.
But this man will be defeated, as I said — and not just defeated, but enslaved. We want virtue always free, always unconquered; take that away, and virtue itself is destroyed.
And if virtue holds protection enough for living well, it holds enough for living happily too. Virtue is certainly enough for us to live bravely; if bravely, then with greatness of spirit — so that nothing ever frightens us and we are always unconquered. It follows that there is nothing to regret, nothing lacking, nothing in the way; so everything runs smoothly, completely, prosperously — and therefore happily. Virtue is sufficient for living bravely; so it is sufficient for living happily as well.
For just as folly never thinks it has gained enough even when it has gotten what it craved, so wisdom is always content with what is present, and never feels a moment's regret over itself. Think of Gaius Laelius and his single consulship — won, at that, after a defeat at the polls (though when a wise and good man like Laelius is passed over, isn't it rather the people who suffer the rejection, losing a good consul, than he, rejected by a good people?). Still, which would you rather be, if the power were given you: consul once, like Laelius, or consul four times, like Cinna?
I have no doubt what you will answer — which is exactly why I know whom I am trusting with the question. I would not put it to just anyone. Another man might well answer that he ranks four consulships above one — and more, that he ranks a single day of Cinna's life above whole lifetimes of many famous men. Laelius would have paid a penalty if he had so much as laid a finger on anyone; Cinna ordered the beheading of his own colleague in the consulship, Gnaeus Octavius; the deaths of Publius Crassus and Lucius Caesar, men of the noblest families, whose worth had been proven at home and at war; of Marcus Antonius, the most eloquent man I have ever heard; of Gaius Caesar, who seems to me to have been the very model of humanity, wit, charm, and grace. Happy, then — the man who killed them? To me, on the contrary, he seems miserable, not only for doing these things but for conducting himself in such a way that he was allowed to do them — though strictly speaking no one is allowed to do wrong; that is a slip of language, since we call "allowed" whatever a man is permitted to get away with.
Which was the happier Gaius Marius, tell me: when he shared the glory of his victory over the Cimbri with his colleague Catulus — almost a second Laelius; I count the two men very much alike — or when, victorious in civil war and full of rage, he answered the friends of Catulus as they pleaded for his life, and answered not once but again and again: "Let him die"? In that affair the happier man was the one who obeyed the wicked word, not the one who so criminally gave it. For as it is better to receive an injury than to inflict one, so it was better to step forward a little way to meet the death that was already approaching, as Catulus did, than to do as Marius did — by the destruction of such a man, to bury his own six consulships and stain the final stretch of his life.
For thirty-eight years Dionysius was tyrant of Syracuse, having seized absolute power at the age of twenty-five. How beautiful the city, how rich the state that he held crushed under slavery! And yet good authorities have left it in writing that this man showed the utmost self-control in his daily habits, and that in the conduct of affairs he was sharp and tireless — and at the same time malicious by nature, and unjust. From which everyone who looks honestly at the truth must conclude that he was utterly miserable. For the very things he had lusted after he failed to obtain even then, at the moment he believed he could do anything.
He was born of good parents and respectable position — though the accounts differ on that point — and he had friendships with men of his own age in plenty, close ties with his relatives, and even, in the Greek fashion, young men bound to him in love. He trusted not one of them. Instead he handed the guarding of his body to slaves he had picked out of the households of the rich — he himself struck the name of slavery off them — and to a collection of drifters and savage barbarians. And so, through his unjust lust for power, he had shut himself, in effect, into a prison. He went further: rather than trust his neck to a barber, he taught his own daughters to cut hair — so that royal girls were reduced, like little barber-women, to the mean and servile trade of trimming their father's beard and hair. And even from them, once they were grown, he took the blade away, and set the rule that they should singe his beard and hair with the glowing shells of walnuts.
He had two wives — Aristomache, a woman of his own city, and Doris of Locri — and when he visited them at night, he would first have everything searched and probed to the last corner. He had ringed the place where his bed stood with a broad moat, crossed by a little wooden footbridge, and once he had shut the bedroom door he swung the bridge away himself. And since he did not dare stand on the public platforms where speakers address the people, he used to harangue them from the top of a high tower.
The story goes that when he wanted to play ball — he was devoted to the game — and took off his tunic, he would hand his sword to a young man he loved. One of his intimates said, joking, "Well, him at least you trust with your life" — and the young man smiled. Dionysius ordered them both killed: the one for pointing out a way he might be murdered, the other for approving the remark with a laugh. And the deed tore at him afterward as nothing else in his whole life did, for he had killed someone he passionately loved. That is how the desires of men without self-command pull against each other. Satisfy this one, and you must fight that one.
And yet this tyrant delivered his own verdict on how happy he really was. One of his flatterers, a man named Damocles, was going on in conversation about his troops, his wealth, the majesty of his rule, the abundance of everything he owned, the magnificence of the royal palace — surely no one had ever been happier. "Then would you like, Damocles," said Dionysius, "since this life delights you so, to taste it yourself and try my fortune firsthand?" Damocles said he would love nothing better. So Dionysius had the man installed on a golden couch spread with a gorgeous woven coverlet, embroidered with magnificent scenes, and loaded the sideboards around him with chased silver and gold. Then he ordered serving boys, chosen for their exceptional beauty, to stand at the table and watch for his nod, attending to his every want.
There were perfumed oils and garlands; incense burned; the tables were piled high with the choicest delicacies. Damocles thought himself a fortunate man. And in the middle of all this splendor, Dionysius ordered a gleaming sword to be let down from the ceiling, hung by a single horsehair, so that it dangled over the happy man's neck. After that, Damocles had no eyes for the beautiful servers or the silver heavy with art; he could not bring himself to reach for the table; the garlands slid, unnoticed, from his head. Finally he begged the tyrant to let him go — "I no longer wish to be happy." Hadn't Dionysius made his declaration plainly enough: that nothing can be happy for the man over whom some terror always hangs? And for him there was no going back — no returning to justice, no restoring liberty and rights to his fellow citizens. As a young man, at that improvident age, he had tangled himself in wrongs and committed crimes of such a kind that he could not be safe the moment he began to be sane.
How much he longed for friendship — while dreading the treachery of friends — he showed in the case of those two Pythagoreans. He had accepted one of them as a hostage for the other's death sentence; the other, to free the friend who had pledged himself, appeared at the very hour appointed for the execution. "How I wish," said Dionysius, "that you would enroll me as the third in your friendship." What misery, to be cut off from the company of friends, from a shared table, from easy familiar talk altogether — and this was a man educated from boyhood, trained in the liberal arts, devoted to musicians, even a tragic poet himself. How good a poet is beside the point; in that art, somehow more than in any other, every man finds his own work beautiful. To this day I have never known a poet — and Aquinius was a friend of mine — who did not think himself the best. That is how it goes: your work delights you, mine delights me. But back to Dionysius. He lived stripped of every human refinement and fellowship — among runaways, criminals, and barbarians — convinced that no one who deserved liberty, or who wanted to be free at all, could be a friend to him.
I will not set against this man's life — I can imagine nothing fouler, more miserable, more detestable — the life of Plato or of Archytas, learned men and truly wise. From that same city I will call up instead a humble little man, raising him from his sand-table and measuring rod, who lived many years later: Archimedes. When I was quaestor in Sicily, I tracked down his grave. The Syracusans knew nothing of it — they denied it even existed — but I found it, hedged in on every side, dressed over with brambles and thickets. I had by heart some little verses which, I had been told, were inscribed on his monument, and they declared that on top of the tomb there stood a sphere together with a cylinder.
So I ran my eyes over everything — at the Agrigentine Gate there is a great crowd of tombs — and I noticed a small column standing just above the brush, with the figure of a sphere and a cylinder on it. I said at once to the Syracusans — their leading men were with me — that I believed this was the very thing I was looking for. Workmen were sent in with sickles, and they cleared the ground and opened up the spot.
When a way in had been made, we walked up to the front of the pedestal. There was the epigram — the second half of each little verse eaten away, worn almost to nothing. And so the noblest city of Greece, once the most learned as well, would not have known the monument of the sharpest mind among all its citizens, if a man from Arpinum had not come and pointed it out. But let my talk return to where it wandered off. Who is there with any dealings at all with the Muses — that is, with humane learning and culture — who would not rather be this mathematician than that tyrant? Look at how each of them lived and what each of them did. The one fed his mind on working out and hunting down proofs, with all the delight of his own ingenuity — the single sweetest nourishment a soul can have. The other fed his on slaughter and injustice, with fear beside him day and night. Come now, set Democritus beside him, and Pythagoras, and Anaxagoras: what kingdom, what riches, would you rank above their studies and their delights?
For that best thing you are seeking must be located in the best part of a man — and what is better in a man than a keen and good mind? Its good, then, is what we must enjoy if we want to be happy. But the good of the mind is virtue; therefore the happy life must be contained in virtue. From this source flows everything beautiful, honorable, splendid — as I said above, though the point deserves a somewhat fuller telling — and all of it is full of joys. And since it is clear that the happy life is made out of continuous and brimming joys, it follows that it is made out of moral goodness.
But so that we do not merely gesture with words at what we want to show, we should set out something like moving pictures, to turn us more toward real knowledge and understanding. Let us take a man of surpassing excellence in the finest arts, and imagine him, for a moment, in thought. First, he must have an extraordinary mind — virtue does not readily keep company with slow wits. Second, a passionate drive to investigate the truth. Out of that drive comes the mind's threefold harvest: one part lies in the knowledge of the world and the explanation of nature; the second in marking off what should be sought and what avoided, and in the art of living well; the third in judging what follows from a thing and what contradicts it — and in that lies all the fineness of argument, and all the truth of judgment.
With what joy, then, must the wise man's soul be filled, living with these concerns, keeping night-watches with them! He surveys the motions and revolutions of the whole world; he sees the countless stars fastened to the sky, fixed in their appointed seats, turning in concert with heaven's own turning; he sees seven others, each holding its own course, standing far apart from one another in height and depth, their wandering motions still tracing out fixed and certain distances along their paths. It was the sight of all this, surely, that stirred those ancient thinkers and prompted them to seek further. From there was born the search for the beginnings of things — the seeds, as it were, from which everything arose, was generated, took form; what the origin is of each kind of thing, lifeless or living, mute or speaking; what its life is, and its death; what change and passage carries one thing into another; where the earth came from, and by what weights it hangs balanced; by what hollows the seas are held up; by what gravity all things, borne downward, forever seek the middle place of the world — which, in a sphere, is also the lowest.
To a soul that handles these questions, turning them over night and day, there comes that knowledge the god at Delphi prescribed: the mind comes to know itself, and to feel itself joined to the divine mind — and from that it is filled with a joy that cannot be exhausted. For the very act of thinking about the power and nature of the gods kindles a longing to imitate their eternity; and the mind no longer believes itself penned into the shortness of this life, once it sees the causes of things linked one to another and bound together by necessity — flowing from eternity into eternity, yet governed all the while by reason and intelligence.
Gazing on all this, looking upward — or rather looking around at every region and outermost shore of things — with what tranquility of soul does he then turn back to consider human affairs, the things nearer at hand! From this comes the knowledge of virtue; the kinds and branches of the virtues flower out; we discover what nature holds to be the final thing among goods and the last extreme among evils, what our duties should be referred to, and what plan of life we ought to choose. And when these questions and others like them have been worked through, the chief result is the very point this discussion is arguing: that virtue is sufficient in itself for living happily.
There follows the third capacity, which seeps and pours itself through every part of wisdom: the one that defines each thing, sorts things into their kinds, joins consequences together, draws complete conclusions, and tells true from false — the art and science of reasoning. It yields the greatest usefulness for weighing any question, and along with that a delight of the most refined kind, entirely worthy of wisdom. But all this belongs to leisure. Now let this same wise man cross over to the protection of the commonwealth. What could be more excellent? His practical wisdom sees where the citizens' true interest lies; his justice diverts not one coin of it into his own house; and he has all the other virtues, so many and so varied, at his command. Add to this the fruit of friendship: in it the learned find counsel for the whole of life, agreeing with their own and almost breathing in time with it, and also the deepest daily pleasure of shared company and shared living. What does such a life lack that could make it happier? To a life packed with joys so many and so great, Fortune herself must give way. And if rejoicing in such goods of the soul — that is, in the virtues — is happiness, and all wise men enjoy those joys to the full, then we are forced to admit that all wise men are happy.
"Even under torture?" he broke in. "Even on the rack?"
And did you suppose, I asked him, that I meant a wise man lying on beds of violets and roses? Is Epicurus to be allowed to say it — a man who merely put on the philosopher's mask and awarded himself the title, though as things stand he says it with my applause — that there is no moment when the wise man cannot cry out, even while he is being burned, tortured, cut open, "How little I care!"? This from the man who defines all evil as pain and all good as pleasure, who laughs at everything we call honorable or base and says we are busy with words, pouring out empty noise — that nothing concerns us except what the body feels as smooth or rough. Shall he, as I said — a man whose standard of judgment barely differs from a beast's — be free to forget himself: to despise fortune, when every good and evil he recognizes lies in fortune's power, and to call himself happy under the extremity of torture and torment, when he has laid it down that pain is not only the greatest evil but the only one?
And he never equipped himself with the remedies that make pain bearable — firmness of mind, shame at anything base, the practice and habit of endurance, the precepts of courage, a manly hardness. No: he says he settles himself with one thing only, the memory of past pleasures. As if a man sweltering in heat he could hardly stand should console himself by remembering that he once bathed in the cold streams of my own Arpinum. I do not see how past pleasures can quiet present evils.
But since he says the wise man is always happy — he who would have no right to say it if he wanted to be consistent with himself — what should they do who hold that nothing is desirable, nothing to be counted a good, that lacks moral goodness? Let me give the advice myself: it is time for the Peripatetics and the old Academics to stop their stammering at last and dare to say, openly and in a clear voice, that the happy life will walk down into the bull of Phalaris.
Grant, then, that there are three kinds of goods — let us get clear, for now, of the Stoics' snares; I know I have used them more than I usually do. Grant those kinds of goods, provided the goods of the body and the external ones lie flat on the ground and are called goods only in the sense that they are "to be taken up," while those other, divine goods of the soul spread themselves far and wide and touch the sky. Then why should I call the man who has won them merely happy, and not the happiest of all? But will the wise man be afraid of pain? Pain is the great objector to our position. Against our own death and the deaths of those we love, against grief and the other disorders of the soul, the discussions of the previous days have, I think, armed and prepared us well enough. But pain looks like virtue's fiercest adversary. Pain is what brandishes its burning torches; pain is what threatens to break down courage, greatness of spirit, endurance.
Shall virtue go down before this? Shall the happy life of the wise and steady man surrender to it? Good gods, what a disgrace that would be! Spartan boys, flesh torn by the lash, do not so much as groan. I have seen with my own eyes, at Lacedaemon, troops of young men contending with unbelievable intensity — fists, feet, nails, finally teeth — ready to drop dead before they would admit defeat. What barbarian country is wilder or more uncultivated than India? Yet in that nation, to begin with, the men held to be wise pass their whole lives naked, and bear the snows of the Caucasus and the violence of winter without pain; and when they give themselves to the flame, they burn without a groan.
And the women of India, when one of them loses her husband, come before a judge to contest which of them he loved the most — for a man there usually has several wives. The winner, exulting, escorted by her family, mounts the pyre beside her husband; the loser walks away in grief. Custom could never defeat nature — nature is always unconquered. It is we who have infected our souls with shade and pampering, leisure, languor, idleness, and softened them, spoiled by opinion and bad habit. Who does not know the custom of the Egyptians? Their minds steeped in the errors of superstition, they would sooner submit to any torture than harm an ibis or an asp, a cat, a dog, or a crocodile — and if they have hurt one even by accident, they refuse no punishment for it.
I have been speaking of human beings. But what of the beasts? Do they not endure cold and hunger, ranging and roaming over mountains and through forests? Do they not fight for their young so hard that they take wounds — fearing no attack, flinching from no blow? I say nothing of what the ambitious will suffer for office, or the praise-hungry for glory, or lovers on fire with desire. Life is crowded with examples.
But let my talk keep its measure and come back to where it turned aside. The happy life, I say it again, will give itself up to torture. Following behind justice, self-control, and above all courage, greatness of spirit, and endurance, it will not stop short at the sight of the torturer's face; when all the virtues walk out to the rack without one tremor of soul, it will not hang back outside the doors, as I said before, at the prison's threshold. For what could be uglier, what more disfigured, than the happy life left standing alone, cut off from that most beautiful escort? Yet that can never happen at all: the virtues cannot hold together without the happy life, nor the happy life without the virtues.
And so they will not let her hang back. They will sweep her along with them to whatever pain and torture they themselves are led. For it is the mark of the wise man to do nothing he could regret, nothing against his will; to do everything splendidly, steadily, gravely, honorably; to count on nothing as certain to happen; to be astonished by nothing when it does happen, as though it were strange and unforeseen; to refer everything to his own judgment; to stand on his own decisions. What could be happier than that, I honestly cannot conceive.
For the Stoics, indeed, the conclusion comes easily. Since they hold that the highest good is to agree with nature and to live in harmony with her, and since that lies not only within the wise man's duty but within his power, it necessarily follows that the man who holds the highest good in his power holds the happy life in his power too. And so the wise man's life is always happy. There you have what I believe can be most boldly said about the happy life — and, as things now stand, unless you can bring something better, most truly said as well.
"Something better I certainly cannot bring," he said. "But there is a favor I would gladly win from you, if it is no trouble. No chains of any fixed school bind you; you sip from all of them whatever strikes you most with the look of truth. A moment ago you seemed to urge the Peripatetics and the old Academy to have the courage to say freely, without hedging, that wise men are always the happiest of all. I would like to hear how you think it consistent for them to say so — since you have argued so much against their position, arguing to Stoic conclusions."
Then let me use the liberty, I said, which we alone in philosophy have the right to use: our discourse decides nothing on its own authority; it is turned toward every side, so that others may judge it on its merits, with no one's name attached to weight the scales. And since what you seem to want is this — that whatever view the disagreeing philosophers take of the ends of goods, virtue should still hold protection enough for a happy life — well, that is a case we are told Carneades used to argue; but he argued it against the Stoics, whom he refuted with all his zeal, the school against whose teaching his whole talent had caught fire. I shall handle it more peaceably. For if the Stoics have set the ends of goods rightly, the business is finished: the wise man must always be happy.
But let us examine, if we can, each of the remaining opinions in turn, so that this splendid ruling, so to call it, in favor of the happy life may be squared with everyone's views and schools. These, I believe, are the opinions on the ends of goods that are still held and defended. First, four simple ones: nothing is good but moral goodness, as the Stoics say; nothing is good but pleasure, as Epicurus holds; nothing is good but freedom from pain, as Hieronymus of Rhodes maintains; nothing is good but the enjoyment of nature's primary goods — all of them, or the greatest — as Carneades used to argue against the Stoics.
Those are the simple opinions; now the mixed. Three kinds of goods — the greatest belonging to the soul, the second to the body, the external ones third — as the Peripatetics hold, and the old Academics say much the same. Dinomachus and Callipho coupled pleasure with moral goodness, while Diodorus the Peripatetic joined freedom from pain to moral goodness. These are the opinions with some standing left; those of Aristo, Pyrrho, Erillus, and a few others have long since evaporated. Let us see what these schools can make good — leaving aside the Stoics, whose position I think I have defended enough. The Peripatetics' case has been laid out too, except for Theophrastus and any of his followers, who dread and shrink from pain too feebly. The rest are free to do what they mostly do anyway: pile up the weight and dignity of virtue. And once they have exalted her to the skies — eloquent men can do that at any length — it is easy, by comparison, to grind everything else down and treat it with contempt. For men who say that praise is worth pursuing even at the price of pain are in no position to deny that the men who have won it are happy. Though such men stand amid certain evils, still this word "happy" reaches far and wide.
For just as trade is called profitable and farming fruitful — not because the one never takes a loss or the other never suffers a ruined season, but because by far the greater part turns out well — so a life can rightly be called happy not only when it is stuffed with goods on every side, but when the goods preponderate, outweighing everything else by far the greater and heavier measure.
By their reasoning, then, the happy life will follow virtue even to the scaffold; it will climb down with her into the bull, on the authority of Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemo, and no threat and no enticement will corrupt her into desertion. Callipho and Diodorus will hold the same, since each of them embraces moral goodness so tightly that he judges everything without it fit only to be set far behind. The rest look more cramped for room, but they swim clear all the same — Epicurus, Hieronymus, and whoever cares to defend that abandoned end of Carneades. For there is not one of them who does not make the mind the judge of goods, and school it thoroughly in despising whatever merely seems good or bad.
For what you take to be Epicurus's case will be Hieronymus's case too, and Carneades's — and, by Hercules, everyone else's. Who among them is poorly prepared against death or pain? Let us begin, if you like, with the man we call soft and pleasure-loving. Well? Does he look to you like a man afraid of death or pain — a man who calls the day he dies a happy day, and who, gripped by the greatest pains, silences them with the memory and recollection of his own discoveries? And he does not do this in a way that suggests he is babbling on the spur of the moment. On death his settled view is that when the living creature dissolves, sensation is snuffed out, and what is without sensation, he judges, is nothing to us at all. On pain, likewise, he has fixed rules to follow: if it is great, he consoles himself with its shortness; if it is long, with its mildness.
Then how exactly are those grand talkers better armed than Epicurus against these two things, which press on us hardest? And against the other things counted as evils — do not Epicurus and the rest of the philosophers seem prepared enough? Who does not dread poverty? Yet not one philosopher does. And this man himself — how little he is content with! No one has said more about plain living. The things that breed the hunger for money — funds for love affairs, for ambition, for daily extravagance — stand so far from him that why should he have any great desire for money, or rather, why should he care about it at all?
Could Anacharsis the Scythian count money as nothing, and our own homegrown philosophers not manage it? A letter of his survives, in these words: "Anacharsis to Hanno, greetings. My clothing is a Scythian hide; my shoes, the calluses on my soles; my bed, the earth; my sauce, hunger; and I live on milk, cheese, and meat. So you may come to me as to a man at peace. As for those gifts you take such delight in — give them to your own citizens, or to the immortal gods." Nearly all philosophers of every school could have been of this same mind, except those whom a flawed nature had twisted away from right reason.
When a great load of gold and silver was being carried past in a procession, Socrates said, "How many things there are I do not need!" When ambassadors from Alexander brought Xenocrates fifty talents — an enormous sum of money in those days, above all at Athens — he took the ambassadors to dinner in the Academy and set before them just enough, with no show whatever. When they asked him the next day to whom he wanted the money paid out, he said, "What? Didn't yesterday's little dinner tell you that I have no need of money?" Then, seeing them rather downcast, he accepted thirty minas, so as not to seem to snub the king's generosity.
Diogenes, though, was blunter about it, as a Cynic would be. When Alexander asked him to say if there was anything he needed, he answered, "For the moment — stand a little out of my sun." The king, evidently, was blocking his light while he warmed himself. And indeed this same man used to argue how far he outstripped the king of Persia in life and in fortune: he himself lacked nothing, while for the king nothing would ever be enough; he felt no craving for the king's pleasures, with which the king could never be satisfied, while the king had no possible way of obtaining his.
You see, I trust, how Epicurus divides up the kinds of desire — not with any great fineness, perhaps, but usefully all the same: some are natural and necessary; some natural but not necessary; some neither. The necessary ones can be satisfied with next to nothing, for nature's riches lie ready to hand. The second kind of desire, he judges, is neither hard to obtain nor hard to do without. The third kind — since they are entirely empty, touching neither necessity nor even nature — he thought should be thrown out root and branch.
On this ground the Epicureans argue at length, and they talk those pleasures down one at a time — the kinds of pleasure they do not despise, though they do go hunting for a good supply. Even the pleasures of sex, about which they have a great deal to say, are easy, they claim, common, and freely available; and if nature demands them, they think the measure is not birth or station or rank, but looks, age, and figure; abstaining from them is not the least bit difficult, if health or duty or reputation requires it; and altogether, this kind of pleasure may be worth choosing if it does no harm — good it never does.
His whole teaching about pleasure comes to this: pleasure itself, he thinks, simply because it is pleasure, is always to be wished for and pursued, and by the same reasoning pain, precisely because it is pain, is always to be fled. So the wise man will run a kind of balance sheet: he will flee a pleasure if it is going to produce a greater pain, and will take on a pain that produces a greater pleasure. And everything pleasant, though it is judged by the body's senses, is referred back all the same to the mind.
That is why the body rejoices only as long as it feels the pleasure in front of it, while the mind both perceives the present pleasure alongside the body and foresees the one that is coming, and does not let the past one slip away downstream. So the wise man will always have his pleasures continuous and woven together, as the expectation of pleasures hoped for is joined to the memory of pleasures already felt.
The same line of thought gets carried over to the table, and the magnificence and expense of banquets get talked down, on the ground that nature is content with modest fare. Really, who fails to see that appetite is the seasoning in all these things? Darius, on the run, drank water that was muddy and fouled with corpses, and said he had never drunk anything more delicious — naturally, for he had never before drunk thirsty. Nor had Ptolemy ever eaten hungry; when he was crossing Egypt and his escort failed to keep up with him, coarse bread was handed him in a hut, and nothing ever seemed to him more delicious than that bread. They tell of Socrates that he once kept up a hard walk right until evening, and when he was asked why he was doing it, he answered that he was shopping for a seasoning to his dinner: walking up a hunger.
And what about the Spartans' fare in their common messes? When the tyrant Dionysius dined there, he said he took no pleasure in that black broth which was the centerpiece of the meal. The man who had cooked it said, "No wonder. The seasonings were missing." "What seasonings?" asked Dionysius. "Hard work in the hunt, sweat, a run down to the Eurotas, hunger, thirst — that is how Spartan feasts are seasoned." And this can be understood not only from the ways of men but from the beasts too, who — provided what is tossed in front of them is not against their nature — are content with it and look no further.
Whole cities, schooled by custom, take delight in plain living, as I said a moment ago about the Spartans. Xenophon lays out the diet of the Persians, who, he says, take nothing with their bread except cress. And yet, if nature should crave something sweeter after all, how many things spring from the earth and from trees, as easy in their abundance as they are outstanding in their sweetness! Add the leanness that follows this restraint in eating; add unbroken health. Now set beside it the men who sweat and belch, stuffed with feasting like fattened oxen:
then you will understand that the men who chase pleasure hardest catch it least, and that the delight of eating lies in appetite, not in being full. They tell of Timotheus, a famous man at Athens and the first citizen of his city, that after dining with Plato and enjoying that dinner enormously, he saw him the next day and said, "Your dinners are delightful not only while they last, but the day after as well." And there is this besides: we cannot even use our minds properly when we are loaded with food and drink. There is a splendid letter of Plato to Dion's relatives, in which he writes, in nearly these words: "When I arrived there, that famous 'happy life' — a life full of Italian and Syracusan tables — pleased me in no way at all: to be stuffed twice a day, never to spend a night alone, and all the rest that goes with that kind of life, in which no man will ever be made wise, and moderate far less.
"For what nature could possibly be so miraculously tempered as to stand it?" How, then, can a life be pleasant when practical wisdom is missing from it, and moderation is missing? This lays bare the error of Sardanapalus, the richest king Syria ever had, who ordered these lines cut into his tomb:
These are mine still: what I ate, and what my glutted lust drank down. The rest — so much, and so splendid — lies there, left behind.
"What else," says Aristotle, "would you inscribe on the grave of an ox, not of a king? He says that in death he possesses the very things which even in life he possessed no longer than the moment he was enjoying them."
Why, then, should riches be longed for — and where exactly does poverty forbid a man to be happy? You have a taste, I suppose, for statues and paintings. Well, if anyone genuinely delights in these, don't men of slender means enjoy them better than the men who own them in heaps? In our city there is the fullest public supply of all such things; the people who hold them privately own fewer, and see them rarely, only when they visit their country places — and even then something pricks them, when they remember how they came by them. The day would run out on me if I chose to plead poverty's case in full. The thing is obvious, and nature herself reminds us every day how few things she needs, how small, and how cheap.
Well then: will obscurity, or low birth, or even the people's hostility keep the wise man from being happy? Watch out that favor with the crowd, and this glory men chase after, doesn't hold more vexation than pleasure. Our Demosthenes was undeniably a bit of a lightweight when he said he was delighted by the whisper of a poor woman carrying water, as the custom is in Greece, whispering to another: "That's him — that's the famous Demosthenes." What could be lighter than that? Yet what an orator! He had learned, evidently, to speak before others; he had not talked much with himself.
So we must understand that popular glory is not worth seeking for its own sake, and that obscurity is nothing to dread. "I came to Athens," says Democritus, "and no one there knew me." A steady and serious man, to boast of standing apart from glory! Shall pipers and men who play the lyre set their tunes and rhythms by their own judgment and not the crowd's, and shall the wise man, endowed with a far greater art, go hunting not for what is truest but for what the mob wants? Is anything more foolish than to write men off one by one as hired hands and boors, and then to think they amount to something when they crowd together? No — the truly wise man will look down on our ambitions and our vanities, and will refuse the people's honors even when they are pressed on him unasked; we, for our part, have no idea how to despise them until we have begun to regret them.
There is a story in Heraclitus, the natural philosopher, about Hermodorus, the leading man of Ephesus. The Ephesians, he said, deserved to be put to death to the last man for what they said when they drove Hermodorus out of their city: "Let no one of us stand out above the rest; if anyone does, let him be somewhere else, among other people." Doesn't this happen in every populace? Don't they hate every towering excellence? What about Aristides — I would rather take my examples from the Greeks than from ourselves — wasn't he expelled from his country for the precise reason that he was just beyond measure? What troubles they escape, then, who have no dealings with the people at all! And what is sweeter than leisure spent with books? I mean the books through which we come to know the boundlessness of things and of nature — and, in this world of ours, the sky, the lands, the seas.
With honor despised, then, and money despised as well, what is left to be terrified of? Exile, I suppose, which is counted among the greatest evils. If exile is an evil because of the people's ill will turned against you, I have just said how contemptible that is. But if being away from your own country is misery, then the provinces are packed with miserable men — of whom precious few ever return home.
"But exiles are stripped of their property." What of it? Hasn't enough been said about bearing poverty? As for exile itself — if we look at the nature of the thing and not the disgrace of the name, how far does it really differ from a life of constant travel? And in constant travel the noblest philosophers spent their lives: Xenocrates and Crantor, Arcesilaus and Lacydes, Aristotle and Theophrastus, Zeno and Cleanthes, Chrysippus and Antipater, Carneades and Clitomachus, Philo and Antiochus, Panaetius and Posidonius, and countless others who, once they set out, never came home again. "Ah, but they traveled without disgrace." Can exile bring disgrace on a wise man at all? This whole discussion is about the wise man, and exile cannot justly fall on him — and a man exiled justly is not owed consolation.
Finally, the easiest way of meeting every misfortune belongs to those who measure everything they pursue in life by pleasure: wherever pleasure is on hand, there they can live happily. So Teucer's line can be fitted to every case: "Wherever you are well off, there is your country." Socrates, asked what state he claimed as his own, said, "The world" — for he counted himself an inhabitant and citizen of the whole world. And Titus Albucius — didn't he pursue philosophy at Athens, in exile, with a perfectly level mind? Though even that would never have happened to him if he had obeyed the laws of Epicurus and kept quiet in public life.
How was Epicurus, living in his own country, any happier than Metrodorus, living at Athens? In what did Plato outdo Xenocrates in happiness, or Polemo outdo Arcesilaus? And what is a city worth, anyway, that drives out its good and wise men? Demaratus, the father of our king Tarquinius, could not endure the tyrant Cypselus: he fled from Corinth to Tarquinii, set up his fortunes there, and raised his children there. Was it stupid of him to prefer the freedom of exile to slavery at home?
Then too, the mind's agitations — its worries and its griefs — are soothed by forgetting, once the thoughts are led across to pleasure. So Epicurus was not speaking without reason when he dared to say that the wise man is always amid a majority of goods, because he is always amid pleasures. And from this, he thinks, the very point we are after follows: that the wise man is always happy.
"Even if he loses the use of his eyes? Even his ears?" Even then — for he holds those very things cheap. First of all, what pleasures does this blindness we find so dreadful actually go without? Some people even argue that while the other pleasures live in the senses themselves, what is perceived by sight involves no delight residing in the eyes at all: what we taste, smell, touch, or hear is felt in the very organ that senses it, but nothing of the kind happens in the eyes — it is the mind that receives what we see. And the mind can be delighted in many and various ways even when sight is never called in. I am speaking, remember, of a learned and cultivated man, for whom to live is to think; and the wise man's thinking rarely summons the eyes as assistants to its inquiries.
After all, if night does not take the happy life away, why should a day that resembles night take it away? The remark of Antipater the Cyrenaic on this point is a shade indecent, but the thought is not absurd. When the women around him were wailing over his blindness, he asked, "What is the matter with you? Do you think the night holds no pleasure?" As for old Appius, who was blind for many years — his magistracies and his record make it plain that in that misfortune of his he failed no duty, private or public. The house of Gaius Drusus, we are told, was regularly packed with people seeking his advice: when the men whose business it was could not see their own affairs, they took a blind man for a guide. When I was a boy, Gnaeus Aufidius, an ex-praetor, was still giving his opinion in the Senate; he never failed a friend who wanted counsel; he was writing a history in Greek — and in literature he could see.
Diodotus the Stoic lived blind for many years in my house. He — and this is the part that is scarcely believable — worked at philosophy far more steadily than before; he played the lyre in the manner of the Pythagoreans; he had books read to him night and day, pursuits in which he had no need of eyes; and — the thing that hardly seems possible without eyes — he kept up his post as a teacher of geometry, telling his students in words where each line began and where to draw it. They say that Asclepiades, an Eretrian philosopher of some standing, when someone asked him what blindness had brought him, answered: one boy the more in his escort. Just as even the most extreme poverty is bearable, if a man may live as some Greeks do every day, so blindness can easily be borne, provided the props for its disabilities are not lacking.
When Democritus lost his sight, he could no longer tell white from black, true; but good and bad, just and unjust, honorable and shameful, useful and useless, great and small — those he could still tell apart. Living happily without the variety of colors is possible; without a grasp of things, it is not. In fact this man held that the mind's keen vision is actually hampered by the seeing of the eyes; and while other men often failed to see what lay in front of their feet, he went ranging through all infinity, halting at no outermost edge. Tradition says Homer was blind as well. But what we have from him is painting, not mere poetry: what region, what coastline, what spot in Greece, what shape and image of combat, what battle-line, what rowing of ships, what movements of men and of beasts has he not painted so vividly that he made us see what he himself could not? Well then — do we suppose that Homer, or any learned man, ever went without delight of mind and pleasure?
If it were otherwise, would Anaxagoras — or this same Democritus — have abandoned their fields and family estates, and given themselves with their whole soul to this divine delight of learning and inquiry? So it is that the poets, who imagine the augur Tiresias as a wise man, never once bring him on lamenting his blindness; while Homer, after drawing Polyphemus as a monster and a savage, has him chat with his ram and praise the animal's luck, because it could walk wherever it wanted and reach whatever it wanted. And rightly, in his case — for the Cyclops had no more sense than the ram.
And in deafness, what evil is there, exactly? Marcus Crassus was slightly hard of hearing, but something else galled him more: the abuse of himself that he did hear — undeservedly, as it seemed to me. Our Roman Epicureans mostly know no Greek, and the Greeks no Latin: so each side is deaf to the other's speech, and all of us are truly deaf in the countless languages we do not understand. "But the deaf never hear the voice of the singer at his lyre." No — and they never hear the shriek of a saw being sharpened, either, or the squeal of a pig at its slaughter, or, when they want to rest, the roar of the muttering sea. And if songs happen to delight them, they ought to reflect, first, that many wise men lived happily before any song was invented, and second, that a far greater pleasure can be taken in reading verses than in hearing them.
Then, just as a moment ago we directed the blind toward the pleasures of the ears, so we may direct the deaf toward the pleasures of the eyes. Besides, a man who can converse with himself will not miss another man's conversation. Now pile everything onto one person: let him be blind and deaf both, and crushed on top of it by the fiercest bodily pains. Such pains, in the first place, usually finish a man off by themselves; but if they happen to drag on at length, and torture him more violently than there could be any reason for enduring them, why in the world, good gods, should we struggle? A harbor lies close at hand — death, the eternal refuge where nothing is felt. Theodorus said to Lysimachus, who was threatening him with death: "A mighty achievement, truly — you have matched the power of a poison beetle."
When Perses begged Paulus not to lead him in his triumph, Paulus said, "That is in your own power." Much was said about death on the first day, when death itself was our question, and not a little on the day after, when the subject was pain; and anyone who remembers it all is in no great danger of failing to think death either something to wish for or, at the very least, nothing to fear. My own view is that in life we should keep the rule that holds at Greek banquets: "Let him drink," it says, "or let him leave." And rightly. Either a man should enjoy the pleasure of the cups together with the others, or he should leave early, so that a sober man does not collide with the violence of the drunk. Just so with the injuries of fortune you cannot bear: you escape them by leaving. Hieronymus says exactly what Epicurus says here, in as many words.
Now, if these philosophers — men whose position is that virtue by itself counts for nothing, and that everything we call honorable and praiseworthy is a hollow thing dressed up in the empty sound of a word — if even they consistently hold that the wise man is always happy, then what do you think should be done by the philosophers who trace their descent from Socrates and Plato? Some of them say the goods of the soul stand so high that the goods of the body and the external goods are buried out of sight beneath them; others do not count those as goods at all, and place everything in the soul.
Their dispute Carneades used to settle, like an arbiter called in as a courtesy. Since whatever counted as goods to the Peripatetics counted as advantages to the Stoics, and since the Peripatetics granted no more weight to riches, sound health, and the rest of that kind than the Stoics did, he held that once these things were weighed by their reality and not by words, there was no ground for quarreling at all. So let the philosophers of the other schools see for themselves how they can secure this point; for my part, I am glad they profess something worthy of a philosopher's voice about the wise man's unbroken power of living well.
But since we must leave in the morning, let us hold in memory these five days of discussion. In fact I believe I will even write them out — for how could I put this leisure of mine, whatever it amounts to, to better use? — and I will send these five further books to our Brutus, who not only urged me toward the writing of philosophy but goaded me into it. How much good I will do other people by it, I cannot easily say; but for my own griefs, the bitterest of griefs, and the troubles that surround me, various and pressing in from every side, no other relief could be found.