In general one might say to the man who mourns, Shall you at some time cease to take this to heart, or shall you feel that you must grieve always every day of your life ? For if you purpose to remain always in this extreme state of affliction, you will bring complete wretchedness and the most bitter misery upon yourself by the ignobleness and cowardice of your soul. But if you intend some time to change your attitude, why do you not change it at once and extricate yourself from this misfortune ? Give attention now to those arguments by the use of which, as time goes on, your release shall be accomplished, and relieve yourself now of your sad condition. For in the case of bodily afflictions the quickest way of relief is the better. Therefore concede now to reason and education what you surely will later concede to time, and release yourself from your troubles. But I cannot, he says, for I never expected or looked for this experience. But you ought to have looked for it, and to have previously pronounced judgement on human affairs for their uncertainty and fatuity, and then you would not now have been taken off your guard as by enemies suddenly come upon you. Admirably does Theseus in Euripides In an unknown play; cf. Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. Euripides, No. 964 D; Cf. the translation by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations , iii. 14 (29). appear to have prepared himself for such crises, for he says: But I have learned this from a certain sage, And on these cares and troubles set my mind, And on myself laid exile from my land And early deaths and other forms of ills, That if I suffer aught my fancy saw, It should not, coming newly, hurt the more. But the more ignoble and untutored sometimes cannot even recall themselves to the consideration of anything seemly and profitable, but go out of their way to find extremes of wretchedness, even to punishing their innocent body and to forcing the unafflicted, as Achaeus Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 757, Achaeus, No. 45. says, to join in their grief. Wherefore very excellently Plato Adapted from the Republic , p. 604 B. appears to advise us in such misfortunes to maintain a calm demeanour, since neither the evil nor the good in them is at all plain, and since no advance is made by the man who takes things much to heart. For grief stands in the way of sane counsel about an event and prevents one from arranging his affairs with relation to what has befallen, as a player does at a throw of the dice, in whatever way reason may convince him would be best. We ought not, therefore, when we have fallen to act like children and hold on to the injured place and scream, but we should accustom our soul speedily to concern itself with curing the injury and raising up the fallen, and we should put away lamentation by remedial art. They say that the lawgiver of the Lyclans Cf. Valerius Maximus, ii. 6. 13. ordered his citizens, whenever they mourned, to clothe themselves first in women’s garments and then to mourn, wishing to make it clear that mourning is womanish and unbecoming to decorous men who lay claim to the education of the free-born. Yes, mourning is verily feminine, and weak, and ignoble, since women are more given to it than men, and barbarians more than Greeks, and inferior men more than better men; and of the barbarians themselves, not the most noble, Celts and Galatians, and all who by nature are filled with a more manly spirit, but rather, if such there are, the Egyptians and Syrians and Lydians and all those who are like them. For it is recorded that some of these go down into pits and remain there for several days, not desiring even to behold the light of the sun since the deceased also is bereft of it. At any rate the tragic poet Ion, Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 743, Ion, No. 54. who was not without knowledge of the foolishness of these peoples, has represented a woman as saying: The nurse of lusty children I have come, To supplicate you, from the mourning pits. And some of the barbarians even cut off parts of their bodies, their noses and ears, and mutilate other portions of their bodies also, thinking to gratify the dead by abandoning that moderation of feeling which Nature enjoins in such cases.