Consolatio ad Apollonium

Therefore Plato[*](Plato, Repub. X. p. 604 B.) doth rightly instruct us to acquiesce in cases of this nature, when it is not manifest whether they be good or evil, and when we get nothing by being uneasy under them; for grief is the greatest obstacle to deliberation as to what is best to be done. Therefore he commands us, as in the casting of dice, to accommodate ourselves to what befalls us, in the way which reason shows us to be best; and when any thing ails us, not to imitate the folly of children, who presently cry out and clap their hands to the place affected, but to accustom our minds to seek at once for remedies which may restore the part that is diseased to its first tone of health, making lamentation give place to the healing art. He that instituted laws for the Lycians commanded the citizens that when they mourned they should put on women’s apparel, intimating thereby that sorrow was an effeminate thing, and therefore was not fit for men of temper and liberal education. For it is indeed a weak and unmanly passion, and women are more subject to it than men, the barbarians more than the Greeks, and the dregs of mankind more than the refined part of them; and even amongst the barbarians, the bravespirited Celts and Gauls have not a propensity to it, or any that have generous sentiments; but the Egyptians, the Syrians, and the Lydians, and those who resemble them n the softness of their disposition. They report that some f these will hide themselves in retirements under ground,

and refuse to behold that sun of which their lamented friend is deprived. Ion, the tragedian, who heard something of this extravagance, introduceth a person speaking after this manner:—

1. Your blooming children’s nurse, I have come forth
2. A suppliant from tlle caves where I have mourned.

Some of these barbarians have deformed their bodies by cutting off their noses, ears, and other parts of themselves, thinking to gratify the dead by these mutilations, when in doing so they deviated excessively from that moderation which Nature prescribes us.