Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Part 5

it is not every mind which has been properly cultivated that produces fruit; and, to go on with the comparison, as a field, although it may be naturally fruitful, cannot produce a crop without dressing, so neither can the mind without education; such is the weakness of either without the other. Whereas philosophy is the culture of the mind: this it is which plucks up vices by the roots; prepares the mind for the receiving of seeds; commits them to it, or, as I may say, sows them, in the hope that, when come to maturity, they may produce a plentiful harvest. Let us proceed, then, as we began. Say, if you please, what shall be the subject of our disputation.

_A._ I look on pain to be the greatest of all evils.

_M._ What, even greater than infamy?

_A._ I dare not indeed a.s.sert that; and I blush to think I am so soon driven from my ground.

_M._ You would have had greater reason for blus.h.i.+ng had you persevered in it; for what is so unbecoming--what can appear worse to you, than disgrace, wickedness, immorality? To avoid which, what pain is there which we ought not (I will not say to avoid s.h.i.+rking, but even) of our own accord to encounter, and undergo, and even to court?

_A._ I am entirely of that opinion; but, notwithstanding that pain is not the greatest evil, yet surely it is an evil.

_M._ Do you perceive, then, how much of the terror of pain you have given up on a small hint?

_A._ I see that plainly; but I should be glad to give up more of it.

_M._ I will endeavor to make you do so; but it is a great undertaking, and I must have a disposition on your part which is not inclined to offer any obstacles.

_A._ You shall have such: for as I behaved yesterday, so now I will follow reason wherever she leads.

VI. _M._ First, then, I will speak of the weakness of many philosophers, and those, too, of various sects; the head of whom, both in authority and antiquity, was Aristippus, the pupil of Socrates, who hesitated not to say that pain was the greatest of all evils. And after him Epicurus easily gave in to this effeminate and enervated doctrine.

After him Hieronymus the Rhodian said, that to be without pain was the chief good, so great an evil did pain appear to him to be. The rest, with the exceptions of Zeno, Aristo, Pyrrho, were pretty much of the same opinion that you were of just now--that it was indeed an evil, but that there were many worse. When, then, nature herself, and a certain generous feeling of virtue, at once prevents you from persisting in the a.s.sertion that pain is the chief evil, and when you were driven from such an opinion when disgrace was contrasted with pain, shall philosophy, the preceptress of life, cling to this idea for so many ages? What duty of life, what praise, what reputation, would be of such consequence that a man should be desirous of gaining it at the expense of submitting to bodily pain, when he has persuaded himself that pain is the greatest evil? On the other side, what disgrace, what ignominy, would he not submit to that he might avoid pain, when persuaded that it was the greatest of evils? Besides, what person, if it be only true that pain is the greatest of evils, is not miserable, not only when he actually feels pain, but also whenever he is aware that it may befall him. And who is there whom pain may not befall? So that it is clear that there is absolutely no one who can possibly be happy. Metrodorus, indeed, thinks that man perfectly happy whose body is free from all disorders, and who has an a.s.surance that it will always continue so; but who is there who can be a.s.sured of that?

VII. But Epicurus, indeed, says such things that it should seem that his design was only to make people laugh; for he affirms somewhere that if a wise man were to be burned or put to the torture--you expect, perhaps, that he is going to say he would bear it, he would support himself under it with resolution, he would not yield to it (and that by Hercules! would be very commendable, and worthy of that very Hercules whom I have just invoked): but even this will not satisfy Epicurus, that robust and hardy man! No; his wise man, even if he were in Phalaris's bull, would say, How sweet it is! how little do I regard it!

What, sweet? Is it not sufficient, if it is not disagreeable? But those very men who deny pain to be an evil are not in the habit of saying that it is agreeable to any one to be tormented; they rather say that it is cruel, or hard to bear, afflicting, unnatural, but still not an evil: while this man who says that it is the only evil, and the very worst of all evils, yet thinks that a wise man would p.r.o.nounce it sweet. I do not require of you to speak of pain in the same words which Epicurus uses--a man, as you know, devoted to pleasure: he may make no difference, if he pleases, between Phalaris's bull and his own bed; but I cannot allow the wise man to be so indifferent about pain. If he bears it with courage, it is sufficient: that he should rejoice in it, I do not expect; for pain is, beyond all question, sharp, bitter, against nature, hard to submit to and to bear. Observe Philoctetes: We may allow him to lament, for he saw Hercules himself groaning loudly through extremity of pain on Mount Oeta. The arrows with which Hercules presented him were then no consolation to him, when

The viper's bite, impregnating his veins With poison, rack'd him with its bitter pains.

And therefore he cries out, desiring help, and wis.h.i.+ng to die,

Oh that some friendly hand its aid would lend, My body from this rock's vast height to send Into the briny deep! I'm all on fire, And by this fatal wound must soon expire.

It is hard to say that the man who was obliged to cry out in this manner was not oppressed with evil, and great evil too.

VIII. But let us observe Hercules himself, who was subdued by pain at the very time when he was on the point of attaining immortality by death. What words does Sophocles here put in his mouth, in his Trachiniae? who, when Deianira had put upon him a tunic dyed in the centaur's blood, and it stuck to his entrails, says,

What tortures I endure no words can tell, Far greater these, than those which erst befell From the dire terror of thy consort, Jove-- E'en stern Eurystheus' dire command above; This of thy daughter, Oeneus, is the fruit, Beguiling me with her envenom'd suit, Whose close embrace doth on my entrails prey, Consuming life; my lungs forbid to play; The blood forsakes my veins; my manly heart Forgets to beat; enervated, each part Neglects its office, while my fatal doom Proceeds ign.o.bly from the weaver's loom.

The hand of foe ne'er hurt me, nor the fierce Giant issuing from his parent earth.

Ne'er could the Centaur such a blow enforce, No barbarous foe, nor all the Grecian force; This arm no savage people could withstand, Whose realms I traversed to reform the land.

Thus, though I ever bore a manly heart, I fall a victim to a woman's art.

IX. a.s.sist, my son, if thou that name dost hear, My groans preferring to thy mother's tear: Convey her here, if, in thy pious heart, Thy mother shares not an unequal part: Proceed, be bold, thy father's fate bemoan, Nations will join, you will not weep alone.

Oh, what a sight is this same briny source, Unknown before, through all my labors' course!

That virtue, which could brave each toil but late, With woman's weakness now bewails its fate.

Approach, my son; behold thy father laid, A wither'd carca.s.s that implores thy aid; Let all behold: and thou, imperious Jove, On me direct thy lightning from above: Now all its force the poison doth a.s.sume, And my burnt entrails with its flame consume.

Crestfallen, unembraced, I now let fall Listless, those hands that lately conquer'd all; When the Nemaean lion own'd their force, And he indignant fell a breathless corse; The serpent slew, of the Lernean lake, As did the Hydra of its force partake: By this, too, fell the Erymanthian boar: E'en Cerberus did his weak strength deplore.

This sinewy arm did overcome with ease That dragon, guardian of the Golden Fleece.

My many conquests let some others trace; It's mine to say, I never knew disgrace.[31]

Can we then, despise pain, when we see Hercules himself giving vent to his expressions of agony with such impatience?

X. Let us see what aeschylus says, who was not only a poet but a Pythagorean philosopher also, for that is the account which you have received of him; how doth he make Prometheus bear the pain he suffered for the Lemnian theft, when he clandestinely stole away the celestial fire, and bestowed it on men, and was severely punished by Jupiter for the theft. Fastened to Mount Caucasus, he speaks thus:

Thou heav'n-born race of t.i.tans here fast bound, Behold thy brother! As the sailors sound With care the bottom, and their s.h.i.+ps confine To some safe sh.o.r.e, with anchor and with line; So, by Jove's dread decree, the G.o.d of fire Confines me here the victim of Jove's ire.

With baneful art his dire machine he shapes; From such a G.o.d what mortal e'er escapes?

When each third day shall triumph o'er the night, Then doth the vulture, with his talons light, Seize on my entrails; which, in rav'nous guise, He preys on! then with wing extended flies Aloft, and brushes with his plumes the gore: But when dire Jove my liver doth restore, Back he returns impetuous to his prey, Clapping his wings, he cuts th' ethereal way.

Thus do I nourish with my blood this pest, Confined my arms, unable to contest; Entreating only that in pity Jove Would take my life, and this cursed plague remove.

But endless ages past unheard my moan, Sooner shall drops dissolve this very stone.[32]

And therefore it scarcely seems possible to avoid calling a man who is suffering, miserable; and if he is miserable, then pain is an evil.

XI. _A._ Hitherto you are on my side; I will see to that by-and-by; and, in the mean while, whence are those verses? I do not remember them.

_M._ I will inform you, for you are in the right to ask. Do you see that I have much leisure?

_A._ What, then?

_M._ I imagine, when you were at Athens, you attended frequently at the schools of the philosophers.

_A._ Yes, and with great pleasure.

_M._ You observed, then, that though none of them at that time were very eloquent, yet they used to mix verses with their harangues.

_A._ Yes, and particularly Dionysius the Stoic used to employ a great many.

_M._ You say right; but they were quoted without any appropriateness or elegance. But our friend Philo used to give a few select lines and well adapted; and in imitation of him, ever since I took a fancy to this kind of elderly declamation, I have been very fond of quoting our poets; and where I cannot be supplied from them, I translate from the Greek, that the Latin language may not want any kind of ornament in this kind of disputation.

But, do you not see how much harm is done by poets? They introduce the bravest men lamenting over their misfortunes: they soften our minds; and they are, besides, so entertaining, that we do not only read them, but get them by heart. Thus the influence of the poets is added to our want of discipline at home, and our tender and delicate manner of living, so that between them they have deprived virtue of all its vigor and energy. Plato, therefore, was right in banis.h.i.+ng them from his commonwealth, where he required the best morals, and the best form of government. But we, who have all our learning from Greece, read and learn these works of theirs from our childhood; and look on this as a liberal and learned education.

XII. But why are we angry with the poets? We may find some philosophers, those masters of virtue, who have taught that pain was the greatest of evils. But you, young man, when you said but just now that it appeared so to you, upon being asked by me what appeared greater than infamy, gave up that opinion at a word. Suppose I ask Epicurus the same question. He will answer that a trifling degree of pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy; for that there is no evil in infamy itself, unless attended with pain. What pain, then, attends Epicurus, when he says that very thing, that pain is the greatest evil! And yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a philosopher than to talk thus. Therefore, you allowed enough when you admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain.

And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be resisted; and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an evil, as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it. The Stoics infer from some petty quibbling arguments that it is no evil, as if the dispute were about a word, and not about the thing itself. Why do you impose upon me, Zeno? For when you deny what appears very dreadful to me to be an evil, I am deceived, and am at a loss to know why that which appears to me to be a most miserable thing should be no evil. The answer is, that nothing is an evil but what is base and vicious. You return to your trifling, for you do not remove what made me uneasy. I know that pain is not vice--you need not inform me of that: but show me that it makes no difference to me whether I am in pain or not. It has never anything to do, say you, with a happy life, for that depends upon virtue alone; but yet pain is to be avoided. If I ask, why? It is disagreeable, against nature, hard to bear, woful and afflicting.

XIII. Here are many words to express that by so many different forms which we call by the single word evil. You are defining pain, instead of removing it, when you say, it is disagreeable, unnatural, scarcely possible to be endured or borne, nor are you wrong in saying so: but the man who vaunts himself in such a manner should not give way in his conduct, if it be true that nothing is good but what is honest, and nothing evil but what is disgraceful. This would be wis.h.i.+ng, not proving. This argument is a better one, and has more truth in it--that all things which Nature abhors are to be looked upon as evil; that those which she approves of are to be considered as good: for when this is admitted, and the dispute about words removed, that which they with reason embrace, and which we call honest, right, becoming, and sometimes include under the general name of virtue, appears so far superior to everything else that all other things which are looked upon as the gifts of fortune, or the good things of the body, seem trifling and insignificant; and no evil whatever, nor all the collective body of evils together, appears to be compared to the evil of infamy.

Wherefore, if, as you granted in the beginning, infamy is worse than pain, pain is certainly nothing; for while it appears to you base and unmanly to groan, cry out, lament, or faint under pain; while you cherish notions of probity, dignity, honor, and, keeping your eye on them, refrain yourself, pain will certainly yield to virtue, and, by the influence of imagination, will lose its whole force.--For you must either admit that there is no such thing as virtue, or you must despise every kind of pain. Will you allow of such a virtue as prudence, without which no virtue whatever can even be conceived? What, then?

Will that suffer you to labor and take pains to no purpose? Will temperance permit you to do anything to excess? Will it be possible for justice to be maintained by one who through the force of pain discovers secrets, or betrays his confederates, or deserts many duties of life?

Will you act in a manner consistently with courage, and its attendants, greatness of soul, resolution, patience, and contempt for all worldly things? Can you hear yourself called a great man when you lie grovelling, dejected, and deploring your condition with a lamentable voice; no one would call you even a man while in such a condition. You must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage, or else pain must be put out of the question.

XIV. You know very well that, even though part of your Corinthian furniture were gone, the remainder might be safe without that; but if you lose one virtue (though virtue in reality cannot be lost), still if, I say, you should acknowledge that you were deficient in one, you would be stripped of all. Can you, then, call yourself a brave man, of a great soul, endued with patience and steadiness above the frowns of fortune? or Philoctetes? for I choose to instance him, rather than yourself, for he certainly was not a brave man, who lay in his bed, which was watered with his tears,

Whose groans, bewailings, and whose bitter cries, With grief incessant rent the very skies.

I do not deny pain to be pain--for were that the case, in what would courage consist?--but I say it should be a.s.suaged by patience, if there be such a thing as patience: if there be no such thing, why do we speak so in praise of philosophy? or why do we glory in its name? Does pain annoy us? Let it sting us to the heart: if you are without defensive armor, bare your throat to it; but if you are secured by Vulcanian armor, that is to say by resolution, resist it. Should you fail to do so, that guardian of your honor, your courage, will forsake and leave you.--By the laws of Lycurgus, and by those which were given to the Cretans by Jupiter, or which Minos established under the direction of Jupiter, as the poets say, the youths of the State are trained by the practice of hunting, running, enduring hunger and thirst, cold and heat. The boys at Sparta are scourged so at the altars that blood follows the lash in abundance; nay, sometimes, as I used to hear when I was there, they are whipped even to death; and yet not one of them was ever heard to cry out, or so much as groan. What, then? Shall men not be able to bear what boys do? and shall custom have such great force, and reason none at all?

XV. There is some difference between labor and pain; they border upon one another, but still there is a certain difference between them.

Labor is a certain exercise of the mind or body, in some employment or undertaking of serious trouble and importance; but pain is a sharp motion in the body, disagreeable to our senses.--Both these feelings, the Greeks, whose language is more copious than ours, express by the common name of [Greek: Ponos]: therefore they call industrious men painstaking, or, rather, fond of labor; we, more conveniently, call them laborious; for laboring is one thing, and enduring pain another.

You see, O Greece! your barrenness of words, sometimes, though you think you are always so rich in them. I say, then, that there is a difference between laboring and being in pain. When Caius Marius had an operation performed for a swelling in his thigh, he felt pain; when he headed his troops in a very hot season, he labored. Yet these two feelings bear some resemblance to one another; for the accustoming ourselves to labor makes the endurance of pain more easy to us. And it was because they were influenced by this reason that the founders of the Grecian form of government provided that the bodies of their youth should be strengthened by labor, which custom the Spartans transferred even to their women, who in other cities lived more delicately, keeping within the walls of their houses; but it was otherwise with the Spartans.

The Spartan women, with a manly air, Fatigues and dangers with their husbands share; They in fantastic sports have no delight, Partners with them in exercise and fight.

And in these laborious exercises pain interferes sometimes. They are thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls, and are bruised, and the labor itself produces a sort of callousness to pain.