Tusculan Disputations by Cicero (reading books for 7 year olds .txt) 📕

dread decree, the God of fire
Confines me here the victim of Jove’s ire.
With baneful art his dire machine he shapes;
From such a God 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.

A. Hitherto you are on my side. I will see to that by-and-by, and, in the meanwhile, 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 banishing 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.

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, woeful and afflicting.

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 wishing, 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,