Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶47 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶47

Wherefore, as I before said, the philosophers have all one method of cure, so that we need say nothing about what sort of thing that is which disturbs the mind, but we must speak only concerning the perturbation itself. Thus first, with regard to desire itself, when the business is only to remove that, the inquiry is not to be whether that thing be good or evil which provokes lust, but the lust itself is to be removed; so that whether whatever is honest is the chief good, or whether it consists in pleasure, or in both these things together, or in the other three kinds of goods, yet should there be in anyone too vehement an appetite for even virtue itself, the whole discourse should be directed to the deterring him from that vehemence. But human nature, when placed in a conspicuous point of view, gives us every argument for appeasing the mind, and, to make this the more distinct, the laws and conditions of life should be explained in our discourse. Therefore, it was not without reason that Socrates is reported, when Euripides was exhibiting his play called Orestes, to have repeated the first three verses of that tragedy— What tragic story men can mournful tell, Whate’er from fate or from the gods befell, That human nature can support— But in order to persuade those to whom any misfortune has happened that they can and ought to bear it, it is very useful to set before them an enumeration of other persons who have borne similar calamities. Indeed, the method of appeasing grief was explained in my dispute of yesterday, and in my book on Consolation, which I wrote in the midst of my own grief, for I was not myself so wise a man as to be insensible to grief, and I used this—notwithstanding Chrysippus’s advice to the contrary, who is against applying a medicine to the agitations of the mind while they are fresh—but I did it, and committed a violence on nature, that the greatness of my grief might give way to the greatness of the medicine.