Tusculan Disputations Cicero (the best books of all time txt) 📖

discernment, and sharp enough for a Sicilian. A. What opinion? for I do not recollect it. M. I will tell you if I can in Latin, for you know I am no more used to bring in Latin sentences in a Greek discourse than Greek in a Latin one. A. And that is right enough. But what is that opinion of Epicharmus? M.

I would not die, but yet
Am not concerned that I shall be dead.

A. I now recollect the Greek. But since you have obliged me to grant that the dead are not miserable, proceed to convince me that it is not miserable to be under a necessity of dying. M. That is easy enough, but I have greater things in hand. A. How comes that to be so easy? And what are those things of more consequence? M. Thus: because, if there is no evil after death, then even death itself can be none. For that which immediately succeeds that is a state where you grant that there is no evil: so that even to be obliged to die can be no evil, for that is only the being obliged to arrive at a place where we allow that no evil is. A. I beg you will be more explicit on this point, for these subtle arguments force me sooner to admissions than to conviction. But what are those more important things about which you say that you are occupied? M. To teach you, if I can, that death is not only no evil, but a good. A. I do not insist on that, but should be glad to hear you argue it, for even though you should not prove your point, yet you will prove that death is no evil. But I will not interrupt you; I would rather hear a continued discourse. M. What, if I should ask you a question, would you not answer? A. That would look like pride. But I would rather you should not ask but where necessity requires. M. I will comply with your wishes, and explain as well as I can what you require; but not with any idea that, like the Pythian Apollo, what I say must needs be certain and indisputable, but as a mere man, endeavoring to arrive at probabilities by conjecture, for I have no ground to proceed further on than probability. Those men may call their statements indisputable who assert that what they say can be perceived by the senses, and who proclaim themselves philosophers by profession. A. Do as you please: We are ready to hear you. M.

The first thing, then, is to inquire what death, which seems to be so well understood, really is. For some imagine death to be the departure of the soul from the body; others think that there is no such departure, but that soul and body perish together, and that the soul is extinguished with the body. Of those who think that the soul does depart from the body, some believe in its immediate dissolution; others fancy that it continues to exist for a time; and others believe that it lasts forever. There is great dispute even what the soul is, where it is, and whence it is derived: with some, the heart itself (cor) seems to be the soul, hence the expressions, excordes, vecordes, concordes; and that prudent Nasica, who was twice consul, was called Corculus, i.e., wise-heart; and Aelius Sextus is described as Egregie cordatus homo, catus Aeliu’ Sextus⁠—that great wise-hearted man, sage Aelius. Empedocles imagines the blood, which is suffused over the heart, to be the soul; to others, a certain part of the brain seems to be the throne of the soul; others neither allow the heart itself, nor any portion of the brain, to be the soul, but think either that the heart is the seat and abode of the soul, or else that the brain is so. Some would have the soul, or spirit, to be the anima, as our schools generally agree; and indeed the name signifies as much, for we use the expressions animam agere, to live; animam efflare, to expire; animosi, men of spirit; bene animati, men of right feeling; exanimi sententia, according to our real opinion; and the very word animus is derived from anima. Again, the soul seems to Zeno the Stoic to be fire.

But what I have said as to the heart, the blood, the brain, air, or fire being the soul, are common opinions. The others are only entertained by individuals, and, indeed, there were many among the ancients who held singular opinions on this subject, of whom the latest was Aristoxenus, a man who was both a musician and a philosopher. He maintained a certain straining of the body, like what is called harmony in music, to be the soul, and believed that, from the figure and nature of the whole body, various motions are excited, as sounds are from an instrument. He adhered steadily to his system, and yet he said something, the nature of which, whatever it was, had been detailed and explained a great while before by Plato. Xenocrates denied that the soul had any figure, or anything like a body, but said it was a number, the power of which, as Pythagoras had fancied some ages before, was the greatest in nature. His master, Plato, imagined a threefold soul, a dominant portion of which⁠—that is to say, reason⁠—he had lodged in the head, as in a tower; and the other two parts⁠—namely, anger and desire⁠—he made subservient to this one, and allotted them distinct abodes, placing anger in the breast, and desire under the praecordia. But Dicaearchus, in that discourse of some learned disputants, held at Corinth, which he details to us in three books⁠—in the first book introduces many speakers, and in the other two he introduces a certain Pherecrates, an old man of Phthia,