Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
of a few only; the conclusion must be that they consulted the good of
none.
XXVIII. You answer that the ill use which a great part of mankind make
of reason no more takes away the goodness of the Gods, who bestow it as
a present of the greatest benefit to them, than the ill use which
children make of their patrimony diminishes the obligation which they
have to their parents for it. We grant you this; but where is the
similitude? It was far from Deianira's design to injure Hercules when
she made him a present of the shirt dipped in the blood of the
Centaurs. Nor was it a regard to the welfare of Jason of Pherae that
influenced the man who with his sword opened his imposthume, which the
physicians had in vain attempted to cure. For it has often happened
that people have served a man whom they intended to injure, and have
injured one whom they designed to serve; so that the effect of the gift
is by no means always a proof of the intention of the giver; neither
does the benefit which may accrue from it prove that it came from the
hands of a benefactor. For, in short, what debauchery, what avarice,
what crime among men is there which does not owe its birth to thought
and reflection, that is, to reason? For all opinion is reason: right
reason, if men's thoughts are conformable to truth; wrong reason, if
they are not. The Gods only give us the mere faculty of reason, if we
have any; the use or abuse of it depends entirely upon ourselves; so
that the comparison is not just between the present of reason given us
by the Gods, and a patrimony left to a son by his father; for, after
all, if the injury of mankind had been the end proposed by the Gods,
what could they have given them more pernicious than reason? for what
seed could there be of injustice, intemperance, and cowardice, if
reason were not laid as the foundation of these vices?
XXIX. I mentioned just now Medea and Atreus, persons celebrated in
heroic poems, who had used this reason only for the contrivance and
practice of the most flagitious crimes; but even the trifling
characters which appear in comedies supply us with the like instances
of this reasoning faculty; for example, does not he, in the Eunuch,
reason with some subtlety?--
What, then, must I resolve upon?
She turn'd me out-of-doors; she sends for me back again;
Shall I go? no, not if she were to beg it of me.
Another, in the Twins, making no scruple of opposing a received maxim,
after the manner of the Academics, asserts that when a man is in love
and in want, it is pleasant
To have a father covetous, crabbed, and passionate,
Who has no love or affection for his children.
This unaccountable opinion he strengthens thus:
You may defraud him of his profits, or forge letters in his name,
Or fright him by your servant into compliance;
And what you take from such an old hunks,
How much more pleasantly do you spend it!
On the contrary, he says that an easy, generous father is an
inconvenience to a son in love; for, says he,
I can't tell how to abuse so good, so prudent a parent,
Who always foreruns my desires, and meets me purse in hand,
To support me in my pleasures: this easy goodness and generosity
Quite defeat all my frauds, tricks, and stratagems.[273]
What are these frauds, tricks, and stratagems but the effects of
reason? O excellent gift of the Gods! Without this Phormio could not
have said,
Find me out the old man: I have something hatching for him in my head.
XXX. But let us pass from the stage to the bar. The praetor[274] takes
his seat. To judge whom? The man who set fire to our archives. How
secretly was that villany conducted! Q. Sosius, an illustrious Roman
knight, of the Picene field,[275] confessed the fact. Who else is to be
tried? He who forged the public registers--Alenus, an artful fellow,
who counterfeited the handwriting of the six officers.[276] Let us call
to mind other trials: that on the subject of the gold of Tolosa, or the
conspiracy of Jugurtha. Let us trace back the informations laid against
Tubulus for bribery in his judicial office; and, since that, the
proceedings of the tribune Peduceus concerning the incest of the
vestals. Let us reflect upon the trials which daily happen for
assassinations, poisonings, embezzlement of public money, frauds in
wills, against which we have a new law; then that action against the
advisers or assisters of any theft; the many laws concerning frauds in
guardianship, breaches of trust in partnerships and commissions in
trade, and other violations of faith in buying, selling, borrowing, or
lending; the public decree on a private affair by the Laetorian
Law;[277] and, lastly, that scourge of all dishonesty, the law against
fraud, proposed by our friend Aquillius; that sort of fraud, he says,
by which one thing is pretended and another done. Can we, then, think
that this plentiful fountain of evil sprung from the immortal Gods? If
they have given reason to man, they have likewise given him subtlety,
for subtlety is only a deceitful manner of applying reason to do
mischief. To them likewise we must owe deceit, and every other crime,
which, without the help of reason, would neither have been thought of
nor committed. As the old woman wished
That to the fir which on Mount Pelion grew
The axe had ne'er been laid,[278]
so we should wish that the Gods had never bestowed this ability on man,
the abuse of which is so general that the small number of those who
make a good use of it are often oppressed by those who make a bad use
of it; so that it seems to be given rather to help vice than to promote
virtue among us.
XXXI. This, you insist on it, is the fault of man, and not of the Gods.
But should we not laugh at a physician or pilot, though they are weak
mortals, if they were to lay the blame of their ill success on the
violence of the disease or the fury of the tempest? Had there not been
danger, we should say, who would have applied to you? This reasoning
has still greater force against the Deity. The fault, you say, is in
man, if he commits crimes. But why was not man endued with a reason
incapable of producing any crimes? How could the Gods err? When we
leave our effects to our children, it is in hopes that they may be well
bestowed; in which we may be deceived, but how can the Deity be
deceived? As Phoebus when he trusted his chariot to his son Phaethon,
or as Neptune when he indulged his son Theseus in granting him three
wishes, the consequence of which was the destruction of Hippolitus?
These are poetical fictions; but truth, and not fables, ought to
proceed from philosophers. Yet if those poetical Deities had foreseen
that their indulgence would have proved fatal to their sons, they must
have been thought blamable for it.
Aristo of Chios used often to say that the philosophers do hurt to such
of their disciples as take their good doctrine in a wrong sense; thus
the lectures of Aristippus might produce debauchees, and those of Zeno
pedants. If this be true, it were better that philosophers should be
silent than that their disciples should be corrupted by a
misapprehension of their master's meaning; so if reason, which was
bestowed on mankind by the Gods with a good design, tends only to make
men more subtle and fraudulent, it had been better for them never to
have received it. There could be no excuse for a physician who
prescribes wine to a patient, knowing that he will drink it and
immediately expire. Your Providence is no less blamable in giving
reason to man, who, it foresaw, would make a bad use of it. Will you
say that it did not foresee it? Nothing could please me more than such
an acknowledgment. But you dare not. I know what a sublime idea you
entertain of her.
XXXII. But to conclude. If folly, by the unanimous consent of
philosophers, is allowed to be the greatest of all evils, and if no one
ever attained to true wisdom, we, whom they say the immortal Gods take
care of, are consequently in a state of the utmost misery. For that
nobody is well, or that nobody can be well, is in effect the same
thing; and, in my opinion, that no man is truly wise, or that no man
can be truly wise, is likewise the same thing. But I will insist no
further on so self-evident a point. Telamon in one verse decides the
question. If, says he, there is a Divine Providence,
Good men would be happy, bad men miserable.
But it is not so. If the Gods had regarded mankind, they should have
made them all virtuous; but if they did not regard the welfare of all
mankind, at least they ought to have provided for the happiness of the
virtuous. Why, therefore, was the Carthaginian in Spain suffered to
destroy those best and bravest men, the two Scipios? Why did
Maximus[279] lose his son, the consul? Why did Hannibal kill Marcellus?
Why did Cannae deprive us of Paulus? Why was the body of Regulus
delivered up to the cruelty of the Carthaginians? Why was not Africanus
protected from violence in his own house? To these, and many more
ancient instances, let us add some of later date. Why is Rutilius, my
uncle, a man of the greatest virtue and learning, now in banishment?
Why was my own friend and companion Drusus assassinated in his own
house? Why was Scaevola, the high-priest, that pattern of moderation and
prudence, massacred before the statue of Vesta? Why, before that, were
so many illustrious citizens put to death by Cinna? Why had Marius, the
most perfidious of men, the power to cause the death of Catulus, a man
of the greatest dignity? But there would be no end of enumerating
examples of good men made miserable and wicked men prosperous. Why did
that Marius live to an old age, and die so happily at his own house in
his seventh consulship? Why was that inhuman wretch Cinna permitted to
enjoy so long a reign?
XXXIII. He, indeed, met with deserved punishment at last. But would it
not have been better that these inhumanities had been prevented than
that the author of them should be punished afterward? Varius, a most
impious wretch, was tortured and put to death. If this was his
punishment for the murdering Drusus by the sword, and Metellus by
poison, would it not have been better to have preserved their lives
than to have their deaths avenged on Varius? Dionysius was thirty-eight
years a tyrant over the most opulent and flourishing city; and, before
him, how many years did Pisistratus tyrannize in the very flower of
Greece! Phalaris and Apollodorus met with the fate they deserved, but
not till after they had tortured and put to death multitudes. Many
robbers have been executed; but the number of those who have suffered
for their crimes is short of those whom they have robbed and murdered.
Anaxarchus,[280] a scholar of Democritus, was cut to pieces by command
of the tyrant of Cyprus; and Zeno of Elea[281] ended his life in
tortures. What shall I say of Socrates,[282] whose death, as often as I
read of it in Plato, draws fresh tears from my eyes? If, therefore, the
Gods really see everything that happens to men, you must acknowledge
they make no distinction between the good and the bad.
XXXIV. Diogenes the Cynic used to say of Harpalus, one of the most
fortunate villains of his time, that the constant prosperity of such a
man was a kind of witness against the Gods. Dionysius, of whom we have
before spoken, after he had pillaged the temple of Proserpine at
Locris, set sail for Syracuse, and, having a fair wind during his
voyage, said, with a smile, "See, my friends, what favorable winds the
immortal Gods bestow upon church-robbers." Encouraged by this
prosperous event, he proceeded in his impiety. When he landed at
Peloponnesus, he went into the temple of Jupiter Olympius, and disrobed
his statue of a golden mantle of great weight, an ornament which the