long as there shall be any force, or vigor, or freshness in
that imagined evil, so long it is entitled to the name of
recent. Take the case of Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus,
King of Caria, who made that noble sepulchre at
Halicarnassus; while she lived, she lived in grief, and died of it,
being worn out by it, for that opinion was always recent
with her: but you cannot call that recent which has
already begun to decay through time. Now the duty of a
comforter is, to remove grief entirely, to quiet it, or draw
it off as much as you can, or else to keep it under, and
prevent its spreading any further, and to divert one's
attention to other matters. There are some who think, with
Cleanthes, that the only duty of a comforter is to prove
that what one is lamenting is by no means an evil. Others,
as the Peripatetics, prefer urging that the evil is not
great. Others, with Epicurus, seek to divert your attention
from the evil to good: some think it sufficient to
show that nothing has happened but what you had reason
to expect; and this is the practice of the Cyrenaics. But
Chrysippus thinks that the main thing in comforting is,
to remove the opinion from the person who is grieving,
that to grieve is his bounden duty. There are others who
bring together all these various kinds of consolations, for
people are differently affected; as I have done myself in
my book on Consolation; for as my own mind was much
disordered, I have attempted in that book to discover
every method of cure. But the proper season is as much to
be attended to in the cure of the mind as of the body; as
Prometheus in Æschylus, on its being said to him,
I think, Prometheus, you this tenet hold,
That all men's reason should their rage control?
answers,
Yes, when one reason properly applies;
Ill-timed advice will make the storm but rise.[1]
XXXII. But the principal medicine to be applied in consolation is, to maintain either that it is no evil at all,
- ↑
Ωκ. Οὐκοῦν Προμηθεῦ τοῦτο γιγνώσκεις ὅτι
ὀργῆς νοσούσης εἰσὶν ἰατροὶ λόγοι.
Πρ. ἐάν τις ἐν καιρῷ γε μαλθάσσῃ κεάρ
καὶ μὴ σφιγῶντα θυμὸν ἰσχναίνη βίᾳ.—
Æsch. Prom. v. 378.
