A Letter of Condolence to Apollonius (5-9)

For as there are in plants at one time seasons of fruitage and at another time seasons of unfruitfulness, and in animals at one time fecundity and at another time barrenness, and on the sea both fair weather and storm, so also in life many diverse circumstances occur which bring about a reversal of human fortunes. As one contemplates these reversals he might say not inappropriately:

Not for good and no ill came thy life from thy sire, Agamemnon, but joy Thou shalt find interwoven with grief; For a mortal thou art. Though against thy desire Yet the plans of the gods will so have it.[*]

and the words of Menander [*]:

If you alone, young master, at your birth Had gained the right to do whate’er you would Throughout your life, and ever be in luck, And if some god agreed to this with you, Then you have right to feel aggrieved. He has Deceived and strangely treated you. But if Upon the selfsame terms as we, you drew The primal breath of universal life (To speak you somewhat in the tragic style), You must endure this better, and use sense. To sum up all I say, you are a man, Than which no thing that lives can swifter be Exalted high and straight brought low again. And rightly so; for though of puny frame, He yet doth handle many vast affairs, And, falling, ruins great prosperity. But you, young master, have not forfeited Surpassing good, and these your present ills But moderate are; so bear without excess What Fortune may hereafter bring to you.

But, in spite of this condition of affairs, some persons, through their foolishness, are so silly and conceited, that, when only a little exalted, either because of abundance of money, or importance of office, or petty political preferments, or because of position and repute, they threaten and insult those in lower station, not bearing in mind the uncertainty and inconstancy of fortune, nor yet the fact that the lofty is easily brought low and the humble in turn is exalted, transposed by the swift-moving changes of fortune. Therefore to try to find any constancy in what is inconstant is a trait of people who do not rightly reason about the circumstances of life. For

The wheel goes round, and of the rim now one And now another part is at the top.[*]

Reason is the best remedy for the cure of grief, reason and the preparedness through reason for all the changes of life. For one ought to realize, not merely that he himself is mortal by nature, but also that he is allotted to a life that is mortal and to conditions which readily reverse themselves. For men’s bodies are indeed mortal, lasting but a day, and mortal is all that they experience and suffer, and, in a word, everything in life; and all this

May not be escaped nor avoided by mortals[*]

at all, but

The depths of unseen Tartarus hold you fast by hardforged necessities,

as Pindar [*] says. Whence Demetrius of Phalerum was quite right when, in reference to a saying of Euripides [*]:

Wealth is inconstant, lasting but a day,

and also:

Small things may cause an overthrow; one day Puts down the mighty and exalts the low,[*]

he said that it was almost all admirably put, but it would have been better if he had said not one day, but one second of time.

Alike the cycle of earth’s fruitful plants And mortal men. For some life grows apace, While others perish and are gathered home.[*]

And elsewhere Pindar [*] says: Somebody? Nobody? Which is which ? A dream of a shadow is man. Very vividly and skilfully did he use this extravagance of expression in making clear the life of mankind. For what is feebler than a shadow ? And a dream of it!—that is something which defies any clear description. In similar strain Crantor, [*] endeavouring to comfort Hippocles upon the death of his children, says: All our ancient philosophy states this and urges it upon us; and though there be therein other things which we do not accept, yet at any rate the statement that life is oftentimes toilsome and hard is only too true. For even if it is not so by nature, yet through our own selves it has reached this state of corruption. From a distant time, yes from the beginning, this uncertain fortune has attended us and to no good end, and even at our birth there is conjoined with us a portion of evil in everything. For the very seed of our life, since it is mortal, participates in this causation, and from this there steal upon us defectiveness of soul, diseases of body, loss of friends by death, and the common portion of mortals. For what reason have we turned our thoughts in this direction? It is that we may know that misfortune is nothing novel for man, but that we all have had the same experience of it. For Theophrastus [*] says: Fortune is heedless, and she has a wonderful power to take away the fruits of our labours and to overturn our seeming tranquillity, and for doing this she has no fixed season. These matters, and others like them, it is easy for each man to reason out for himself, and to learn them from wise men of old besides; of whom the first is the divine Homer, who said [*]:

Nothing more wretched than man doth the earth support on its bosom, Never, he says to himself, shall he suffer from evil hereafter, Never, so long as the gods give him strength and his knees are still nimble; Then when the blessed gods bring upon him grievous affliction, Still he endures his misfortune, reluctant but steadfast in spirit.

And:

Such is the mood of the men who here on the earth are abiding, E’en as the day which the father of men and of gods brings upon them.[*]

And in another place:

Great-hearted son of Tydeus, why do you ask of my fathers ? As is the race of the leaves, such too is that of all mortals. Some of the leaves doth the wind scatter earthward, and others the forest Budding puts forth in profusion, and springtime is coming upon us. Thus is man’s race: one enters on life, and another’s life ceases.[*]

That he has admirably made use of this image of human life is clear from what he says in another place, in these words: To fight for the sake of mortals

Wretched, who like to the leaves, at the one time all ardent Come to their fitting perfection, and eat of the fruit of their acres; Then again helpless they perish, nor is there aught that can help them.[*]

Pausanias, king of the Lacedaemonians, who persistently boasted of his own exploits, mockingly urged the lyric poet Simonides to rehearse for him some wise saying, whereupon the poet, being fully cognizant of his conceit, advised him to remember that he was only human.[*]

Philip, the king of the Macedonians, happened to have three pieces of good news reported to him all at once: the first, that he was victor at the Olympic games in the race of the four-horse chariots; the second, that Parmenio, his general, had vanquished the Dardanians in battle, and the third, that Olympias had borne him a male child; whereupon, stretching out his hands toward the heavens, he said: O God, offset all this by some moderate misfortune ! For he well knew that in cases of great prosperity fortune is wont to be jealous.[*]

While Theramenes, who afterwards became one of the Thirty Tyrants at Athens, was dining with several others, the house, in which they were, collapsed, and he was the only one to escape death; but as he was being congratulated by everybody, he raised his voice and exclaimed in a loud tone, O Fortune, for what occasion are you reserving me ? And not long afterward he came to his end by torture at the hands of his fellow tyrants.[*]

The Poet [*] is regarded as extraordinarily successful in bestowing consolation, where he represents Achilles as speaking to Priam, who has come to ransom Hector, as follows:

Come then and rest on a seat; let us suffer our sorrows to slumber Quietly now in our bosoms, in spite of our woeful afflictions; Nothing is ever accomplished by yielding to chill lamentation. Thus, then, the gods have spun the fate of unhappy mortals, Ever to live in distress, but themselves are free from all trouble. Fixed on Zeus’ floor two massive urns stand for ever, Filled with gifts of all ills that he gives, and another [*] of blessings; He on whom Zeus, god of thunder, bestows their contents commingled Sometimes meets with the good, and again he meets only with evil. Him upon whom he bestows what is baneful he makes wholly wretched; Ravenous hunger drives him o’er the earth’s goodly bosom, Hither and thither he goes, unhonoured of gods or of mortals.

Hesiod, who, although he proclaimed himself the disciple of the Muses, is nevertheless second to Homer in reputation as well as in time, also confines the evils in a great urn and represents Pandora as opening it and scattering the host of them over the whole land and sea. His words [*] are as follows:

Then with her hands did the woman, uplifting the urn’s massive cover, Let them go as they would; and on men she brought woeful afflictions.

Hope alone where it was, with its place of abode yet undamaged, Under the rim of the urn still tarried; nor into the open Winged its way forth; for before it escaped she had put on the cover. More are the woes unnumbered among men now freely ranging. Full is the land now of evils, and full of them too is the ocean; Illnesses come upon men in the daytime, and others at nighttime; Hither and thither they go, of themselves bringing evils to mortals; Silent they go, since the wisdom of Zeus has deprived them of voices.

Closely allied with this are the following words of the comic poet [*] spoken with reference to those whose grief over such calamities is excessive: If only tears were remedy for ills, And he who weeps obtained surcease of woe, Then we should purchase tears by giving gold. But as it is, events that come to pass, My master, do not mind nor heed these things, But, whether you shed tears or not, pursue The even tenor of their way. What then Do we accomplish by our weeping ? Naught. But as the trees have fruit, grief has these tears. And Dictys, who is trying to console Danaë in her excessive grief, says:

Think you that Hades minds your moans at all, And will send back your child if you will groan ? Desist. By viewing close your neighbour’s ills You might be more composed,—if you reflect How many mortals have to toil in bonds,

How many reft of children face old age, And others still who from a prosperous reign Sink down to nothing. This you ought to heed.[*]

For he bids her to think of the lot of those who are equally unfortunate or even more unfortunate than herself, with the idea that her grief will be lightened.

In this connexion might be adduced the utterance of Socrates [*] which suggests that if we were all to bring our misfortunes into a common store, so that each person should receive an equal share in the distribution, the majority would be glad to take up their own and depart.

The poet Antimachus, also, employed a similar method. For after the death of his wife, Lyde, whom he loved very dearly, he composed, as a consolation for his grief, the elegy called Lyde, in which he enumerated the misfortunes of the heroes, and thus made his own grief less by means of others’ ills. So it is clear that he who tries to console a person in grief, and demonstrates that the calamity is one which is common to many, and less than the calamities which have befallen others, changes the opinion of the one in grief and gives him a similar conviction— that his calamity is really less than he supposed it to be.