Tusculan Disputations 3 ¶45 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 3 ¶45

Here some people talk of moderate grief; but if such be natural, what occasion is there for consolation? for nature herself will determine the measure of it. But if it depends on and is caused by opinion, the whole opinion should be destroyed. I think that it has been sufficiently said that grief arises from an opinion of some present evil, which includes this belief: that it is incumbent on us to grieve. To this definition Zeno has added, very justly, that the opinion of this present evil should be recent. Now this word recent they explain thus: those are not the only recent things which happened a little while ago, but as long as there shall be any force, or vigor, or freshness in that imagined evil, so long it is entitled to the name of recent. Take the case of Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus, King of Caria, who made that noble sepulchre at Halicarnassus. While she lived, she lived in grief, and died of it, being worn out by it, for that opinion was always recent with her; but you cannot call that recent which has already begun to decay through time. Now the duty of a comforter is to remove grief entirely, to quiet it, or draw it off as much as you can, or else to keep it under, and prevent its spreading any further, and to divert one’s attention to other matters. There are some who think, with Cleanthes, that the only duty of a comforter is to prove that what one is lamenting is by no means an evil. Others, as the Peripatetics, prefer urging that the evil is not great. Others, with Epicurus, seek to divert your attention from the evil to good. Some think it sufficient to show that nothing has happened but what you had reason to expect, and this is the practice of the Cyrenaics. But Chrysippus thinks that the main thing in comforting is to remove the opinion, from the person who is grieving, that to grieve is his bounden duty. There are others who bring together all these various kinds of consolations, for people are differently affected; as I have done myself in my book on Consolation; for as my own mind was much disordered, I have attempted in that book to discover every method of cure. But the proper season is as much to be attended to in the cure of the mind as of the body, as Prometheus in Aeschylus, on its being said to him, I think, Prometheus, you this tenet hold, That all men’s reason should their rage control? answers, Yes, when one reason properly applies; Ill-timed advice will make the storm but rise.