Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
bravest men lamenting over their misfortunes: they soften our minds;
and they are, besides, so entertaining, that we do not only read them,
but get them by heart. Thus the influence of the poets is added to our
want of discipline at home, and our tender and delicate manner of
living, so that between them they have deprived virtue of all its vigor
and energy. Plato, therefore, was right in banishing them from his
commonwealth, where he required the best morals, and the best form of
government. But we, who have all our learning from Greece, read and
learn these works of theirs from our childhood; and look on this as a
liberal and learned education.
XII. But why are we angry with the poets? We may find some
philosophers, those masters of virtue, who have taught that pain was
the greatest of evils. But you, young man, when you said but just now
that it appeared so to you, upon being asked by me what appeared
greater than infamy, gave up that opinion at a word. Suppose I ask
Epicurus the same question. He will answer that a trifling degree of
pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy; for that there is no
evil in infamy itself, unless attended with pain. What pain, then,
attends Epicurus, when he says that very thing, that pain is the
greatest evil! And yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a
philosopher than to talk thus. Therefore, you allowed enough when you
admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain.
And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be
resisted; and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an
evil, as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it. The Stoics
infer from some petty quibbling arguments that it is no evil, as if the
dispute were about a word, and not about the thing itself. Why do you
impose upon me, Zeno? For when you deny what appears very dreadful to
me to be an evil, I am deceived, and am at a loss to know why that
which appears to me to be a most miserable thing should be no evil. The
answer is, that nothing is an evil but what is base and vicious. You
return to your trifling, for you do not remove what made me uneasy. I
know that pain is not vice--you need not inform me of that: but show me
that it makes no difference to me whether I am in pain or not. It has
never anything to do, say you, with a happy life, for that depends upon
virtue alone; but yet pain is to be avoided. If I ask, why? It is
disagreeable, against nature, hard to bear, woful and afflicting.
XIII. Here are many words to express that by so many different forms
which we call by the single word evil. You are defining pain, instead
of removing it, when you say, it is disagreeable, unnatural, scarcely
possible to be endured or borne, nor are you wrong in saying so: but
the man who vaunts himself in such a manner should not give way in his
conduct, if it be true that nothing is good but what is honest, and
nothing evil but what is disgraceful. This would be wishing, not
proving. This argument is a better one, and has more truth in it--that
all things which Nature abhors are to be looked upon as evil; that
those which she approves of are to be considered as good: for when this
is admitted, and the dispute about words removed, that which they with
reason embrace, and which we call honest, right, becoming, and
sometimes include under the general name of virtue, appears so far
superior to everything else that all other things which are looked upon
as the gifts of fortune, or the good things of the body, seem trifling
and insignificant; and no evil whatever, nor all the collective body of
evils together, appears to be compared to the evil of infamy.
Wherefore, if, as you granted in the beginning, infamy is worse than
pain, pain is certainly nothing; for while it appears to you base and
unmanly to groan, cry out, lament, or faint under pain; while you
cherish notions of probity, dignity, honor, and, keeping your eye on
them, refrain yourself, pain will certainly yield to virtue, and, by
the influence of imagination, will lose its whole force.--For you must
either admit that there is no such thing as virtue, or you must despise
every kind of pain. Will you allow of such a virtue as prudence,
without which no virtue whatever can even be conceived? What, then?
Will that suffer you to labor and take pains to no purpose? Will
temperance permit you to do anything to excess? Will it be possible for
justice to be maintained by one who through the force of pain discovers
secrets, or betrays his confederates, or deserts many duties of life?
Will you act in a manner consistently with courage, and its attendants,
greatness of soul, resolution, patience, and contempt for all worldly
things? Can you hear yourself called a great man when you lie
grovelling, dejected, and deploring your condition with a lamentable
voice; no one would call you even a man while in such a condition. You
must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage, or else pain
must be put out of the question.
XIV. You know very well that, even though part of your Corinthian
furniture were gone, the remainder might be safe without that; but if
you lose one virtue (though virtue in reality cannot be lost), still
if, I say, you should acknowledge that you were deficient in one, you
would be stripped of all. Can you, then, call yourself a brave man, of
a great soul, endued with patience and steadiness above the frowns of
fortune? or Philoctetes? for I choose to instance him, rather than
yourself, for he certainly was not a brave man, who lay in his bed,
which was watered with his tears,
Whose groans, bewailings, and whose bitter cries,
With grief incessant rent the very skies.
I do not deny pain to be pain--for were that the case, in what would
courage consist?--but I say it should be assuaged by patience, if there
be such a thing as patience: if there be no such thing, why do we speak
so in praise of philosophy? or why do we glory in its name? Does pain
annoy us? Let it sting us to the heart: if you are without defensive
armor, bare your throat to it; but if you are secured by Vulcanian
armor, that is to say by resolution, resist it. Should you fail to do
so, that guardian of your honor, your courage, will forsake and leave
you.--By the laws of Lycurgus, and by those which were given to the
Cretans by Jupiter, or which Minos established under the direction of
Jupiter, as the poets say, the youths of the State are trained by the
practice of hunting, running, enduring hunger and thirst, cold and
heat. The boys at Sparta are scourged so at the altars that blood
follows the lash in abundance; nay, sometimes, as I used to hear when I
was there, they are whipped even to death; and yet not one of them was
ever heard to cry out, or so much as groan. What, then? Shall men not
be able to bear what boys do? and shall custom have such great force,
and reason none at all?
XV. There is some difference between labor and pain; they border upon
one another, but still there is a certain difference between them.
Labor is a certain exercise of the mind or body, in some employment or
undertaking of serious trouble and importance; but pain is a sharp
motion in the body, disagreeable to our senses.--Both these feelings,
the Greeks, whose language is more copious than ours, express by the
common name of [Greek: Ponos]: therefore they call industrious men
painstaking, or, rather, fond of labor; we, more conveniently, call
them laborious; for laboring is one thing, and enduring pain another.
You see, O Greece! your barrenness of words, sometimes, though you
think you are always so rich in them. I say, then, that there is a
difference between laboring and being in pain. When Caius Marius had an
operation performed for a swelling in his thigh, he felt pain; when he
headed his troops in a very hot season, he labored. Yet these two
feelings bear some resemblance to one another; for the accustoming
ourselves to labor makes the endurance of pain more easy to us. And it
was because they were influenced by this reason that the founders of
the Grecian form of government provided that the bodies of their youth
should be strengthened by labor, which custom the Spartans transferred
even to their women, who in other cities lived more delicately, keeping
within the walls of their houses; but it was otherwise with the
Spartans.
The Spartan women, with a manly air,
Fatigues and dangers with their husbands share;
They in fantastic sports have no delight,
Partners with them in exercise and fight.
And in these laborious exercises pain interferes sometimes. They are
thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls, and are bruised, and the
labor itself produces a sort of callousness to pain.
XVI. As to military service (I speak of our own, not of that of the
Spartans, for they used to march slowly to the sound of the flute, and
scarce a word of command was given without an anapaest), you may see, in
the first place, whence the very name of an army (_exercitus_[33]) is
derived; and, secondly, how great the labor is of an army on its march:
then consider that they carry more than a fortnight's provision, and
whatever else they may want; that they carry the burden of the
stakes,[34] for as to shield, sword, or helmet, they look on them as no
more encumbrance than their own limbs, for they say that arms are the
limbs of a soldier, and those, indeed, they carry so commodiously that,
when there is occasion, they throw down their burdens, and use their
arms as readily as their limbs. Why need I mention the exercises of the
legions? And how great the labor is which is undergone in the running,
encounters, shouts! Hence it is that their minds are worked up to make
so light of wounds in action. Take a soldier of equal bravery, but
undisciplined, and he will seem a woman. Why is it that there is this
sensible difference between a raw recruit and a veteran soldier? The
age of the young soldiers is for the most part in their favor; but it
is practice only that enables men to bear labor and despise wounds.
Moreover, we often see, when the wounded are carried off the field, the
raw, untried soldier, though but slightly wounded, cries out most
shamefully; but the more brave, experienced veteran only inquires for
some one to dress his wounds, and says,
Patroclus, to thy aid I must appeal
Ere worse ensue, my bleeding wounds to heal;
The sons of AEsculapius are employ'd,
No room for me, so many are annoy'd.
XVII. This is certainly Eurypylus himself. What an experienced
man!--While his friend is continually enlarging on his misfortunes, you
may observe that he is so far from weeping that he even assigns a
reason why he should bear his wounds with patience.
Who at his enemy a stroke directs,
His sword to light upon himself expects.
Patroclus, I suppose, will lead him off to his chamber to bind up his
wounds, at least if he be a man: but not a word of that; he only
inquires how the battle went:
Say how the Argives bear themselves in fight?
And yet no words can show the truth as well as those, your deeds and
visible sufferings.
Peace! and my wounds bind up;
but though Eurypylus could bear these afflictions, AEsopus could not,
Where Hector's fortune press'd our yielding troops;
and he explains the rest, though in pain. So unbounded is military
glory in a brave man! Shall, then, a veteran soldier be able to behave
in this manner, and shall a wise and learned man not be able? Surely
the latter might be able to bear pain better, and in no small degree
either. At present, however, I am confining myself to what is
engendered by practice and discipline. I am not yet come to speak of
reason and philosophy. You may often hear of old women living without