Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
Pelops was greatly to blame in not having informed and taught his son
what regard was due to everything.
XLV. But what occasion is there to animadvert on the opinions of
individuals, when we may observe whole nations to fall into all sorts
of errors? The Egyptians embalm their dead, and keep them in their
houses; the Persians dress them over with wax, and then bury them, that
they may preserve their bodies as long as possible. It is customary
with the Magi to bury none of their order, unless they have been first
torn by wild beasts. In Hyrcania, the people maintain dogs for the
public use; the nobles have their own--and we know that they have a
good breed of dogs; but every one, according to his ability, provides
himself with some, in order to be torn by them; and they hold that to
be the best kind of interment. Chrysippus, who is curious in all kinds
of historical facts, has collected many other things of this kind; but
some of them are so offensive as not to admit of being related. All
that has been said of burying is not worth our regard with respect to
ourselves, though it is not to be neglected as to our friends, provided
we are thoroughly aware that the dead are insensible. But the living,
indeed, should consider what is due to custom and opinion; only they
should at the same time consider that the dead are noways interested in
it. But death truly is then met with the greatest tranquillity when the
dying man can comfort himself with his own praise. No one dies too soon
who has finished the course of perfect virtue. I myself have known many
occasions when I have seemed in danger of immediate death; oh! how I
wish it had come to me! for I have gained nothing by the delay. I had
gone over and over again the duties of life; nothing remained but to
contend with fortune. If reason, then, cannot sufficiently fortify us
to enable us to feel a contempt for death, at all events let our past
life prove that we have lived long enough, and even longer than was
necessary; for notwithstanding the deprivation of sense, the dead are
not without that good which peculiarly belongs to them, namely, the
praise and glory which they have acquired, even though they are not
sensible of it. For although there be nothing in glory to make it
desirable, yet it follows virtue as its shadow; and the genuine
judgment of the multitude on good men, if ever they form any, is more
to their own praise than of any real advantage to the dead. Yet I
cannot say, however it may be received, that Lycurgus and Solon have no
glory from their laws, and from the political constitution which they
established in their country; or that Themistocles and Epaminondas have
not glory from their martial virtue.
XLVI. For Neptune shall sooner bury Salamis itself with his waters than
the memory of the trophies gained there; and the Boeotian Leuctra shall
perish sooner than the glory of that great battle. And longer still
shall fame be before it deserts Curius, and Fabricius, and Calatinus,
and the two Scipios, and the two Africani, and Maximus, and Marcellus,
and Paulus, and Cato, and Laelius, and numberless other heroes; and
whoever has caught any resemblance of them, not estimating it by common
fame, but by the real applause of good men, may with confidence, when
the occasion requires, approach death, on which we are sure that even
if the chief good is not continued, at least no evil is. Such a man
would even wish to die while in prosperity; for all the favors that
could be heaped on him would not be so agreeable to him as the loss of
them would be painful. That speech of the Lacedaemonian seems to have
the same meaning, who, when Diagoras the Rhodian, who had himself been
a conqueror at the Olympic games, saw two of his own sons conquerors
there on the same day, approached the old man, and, congratulating him,
said, "You should die now, Diagoras, for no greater happiness can
possibly await you." The Greeks look on these as great things; perhaps
they think too highly of them, or, rather, they did so then. And so he
who said this to Diagoras, looking on it as something very glorious,
that three men out of one family should have been conquerors there,
thought it could answer no purpose to him to continue any longer in
life, where he could only be exposed to a reverse of fortune.
I might have given you a sufficient answer, as it seems to me, on this
point, in a few words, as you had allowed the dead were not exposed to
any positive evil; but I have spoken at greater length on the subject
for this reason, because this is our greatest consolation in the losing
and bewailing of our friends. For we ought to bear with moderation any
grief which arises from ourselves, or is endured on our own account,
lest we should seem to be too much influenced by self-love. But should
we suspect our departed friends to be under those evils, which they are
generally imagined to be, and to be sensible of them, then such a
suspicion would give us intolerable pain; and accordingly I wished, for
my own sake, to pluck up this opinion by the roots, and on that account
I have been perhaps somewhat more prolix than was necessary.
XLVII. _A._ More prolix than was necessary? Certainty not, in my
opinion. For I was induced, by the former part of your speech, to wish
to die; but, by the latter, sometimes not to be unwilling, and at
others to be wholly indifferent about it. But the effect of your whole
argument is, that I am convinced that death ought not to be classed
among the evils.
_M._ Do you, then, expect that I am to give you a regular peroration,
like the rhetoricians, or shall I forego that art?
_A._ I would not have you give over an art which you have set off to
such advantage; and you were in the right to do so, for, to speak the
truth, it also has set you off. But what is that peroration? For I
should be glad to hear it, whatever it is.
_M._ It is customary, in the schools, to produce the opinions of the
immortal Gods on death; nor are these opinions the fruits of the
imagination alone of the lecturers, but they have the authority of
Herodotus and many others. Cleobis and Biton are the first they
mention, sons of the Argive priestess; the story is a well-known one.
As it was necessary that she should be drawn in a chariot to a certain
annual sacrifice, which was solemnized at a temple some considerable
distance from the town, and the cattle that were to draw the chariot
had not arrived, those two young men whom I have just mentioned,
pulling off their garments, and anointing their bodies with oil,
harnessed themselves to the yoke. And in this manner the priestess was
conveyed to the temple; and when the chariot had arrived at the proper
place, she is said to have entreated the Goddess to bestow on them, as
a reward for their piety, the greatest gift that a God could confer on
man. And the young men, after having feasted with their mother, fell
asleep; and in the morning they were found dead. Trophonius and
Agamedes are said to have put up the same petition, for they, having
built a temple to Apollo at Delphi, offered supplications to the God,
and desired of him some extraordinary reward for their care and labor,
particularizing nothing, but asking for whatever was best for men.
Accordingly, Apollo signified to them that he would bestow it on them
in three days, and on the third day at daybreak they were found dead.
And so they say that this was a formal decision pronounced by that God
to whom the rest of the deities have assigned the province of divining
with an accuracy superior to that of all the rest.
XLVIII. There is also a story told of Silenus, who, when taken prisoner
by Midas, is said to have made him this present for his ransom--namely,
that he informed him[25] that never to have been born was by far the
greatest blessing that could happen to man; and that the next best
thing was to die very soon; which very opinion Euripides makes use of
in his Cresphontes, saying,
When man is born, 'tis fit, with solemn show,
We speak our sense of his approaching woe;
With other gestures and a different eye,
Proclaim our pleasure when he's bid to die.[26]
There is something like this in Crantor's Consolation; for he says that
Terinaesus of Elysia, when he was bitterly lamenting the loss of his
son, came to a place of divination to be informed why he was visited
with so great affliction, and received in his tablet these three
verses:
Thou fool, to murmur at Euthynous' death!
The blooming youth to fate resigns his breath:
The fate, whereon your happiness depends,
At once the parent and the son befriends.[27]
On these and similar authorities they affirm that the question has been
determined by the Gods. Nay, more; Alcidamas, an ancient rhetorician of
the very highest reputation, wrote even in praise of death, which he
endeavored to establish by an enumeration of the evils of life; and his
Dissertation has a great deal of eloquence in it; but he was
unacquainted with the more refined arguments of the philosophers. By
the orators, indeed, to die for our country is always considered not
only as glorious, but even as happy: they go back as far as
Erechtheus,[28] whose very daughters underwent death, for the safety of
their fellow-citizens: they instance Codrus, who threw himself into the
midst of his enemies, dressed like a common man, that his royal robes
might not betray him, because the oracle had declared the Athenians
conquerors, if their king was slain. Menoeceus[29] is not overlooked by
them, who, in compliance with the injunctions of an oracle, freely shed
his blood for his country. Iphigenia ordered herself to be conveyed to
Aulis, to be sacrificed, that her blood might be the cause of spilling
that of her enemies.
XLIX. From hence they proceed to instances of a fresher date. Harmodius
and Aristogiton are in everybody's mouth; the memory of Leonidas the
Lacedaemonian and Epaminondas the Theban is as fresh as ever. Those
philosophers were not acquainted with the many instances in our
country--to give a list of whom would take up too much time--who, we
see, considered death desirable as long as it was accompanied with
honor. But, notwithstanding this is the correct view of the case, we
must use much persuasion, speak as if we were endued with some higher
authority, in order to bring men to begin to wish to die, or cease to
be afraid of death. For if that last day does not occasion an entire
extinction, but a change of abode only, what can be more desirable? And
if it, on the other hand, destroys, and absolutely puts an end to us,
what can be preferable to the having a deep sleep fall on us, in the
midst of the fatigues of life, and being thus overtaken, to sleep to
eternity? And, should this really be the case, then Ennius's language
is more consistent with wisdom than Solon's; for our Ennius says,
Let none bestow upon my passing bier
One needless sigh or unavailing tear.
But the wise Solon says,
Let me not unlamented die, but o'er my bier
Burst forth the tender sigh, the friendly tear.[30]
But let us, if indeed it should be our fate to know the time which is
appointed by the Gods for us to die, prepare ourselves for it with a
cheerful and grateful mind, thinking ourselves like men who are
delivered from a jail, and released from their fetters, for the purpose
of going back to our eternal habitation, which may be more emphatically
called our own; or else to be divested of all sense and trouble. If, on
the other hand, we should have no notice given us of this decree, yet
let us cultivate such a disposition as to look on that formidable hour
of death as happy for us, though shocking to our friends; and let us
never imagine anything to be an evil which is an appointment of the