Tusculan Disputations 3 ¶46 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 3 ¶46

But the principal medicine to be applied in consolation is to maintain either that it is no evil at all, or a very inconsiderable one. The next best to that is to speak of the common condition of life, having a view, if possible, to the state of the person whom you comfort particularly. The third is that it is folly to wear one’s self out with grief which can avail nothing. For the comfort of Cleanthes is suitable only for a wise man, who is in no need of any comfort at all; for could you persuade one in grief that nothing is an evil but what is base, you would not only cure him of grief, but folly. But the time for such precepts is not well chosen. Besides, Cleanthes does not seem to me sufficiently aware that affliction may very often proceed from that very thing which he himself allows to be the greatest misfortune. For what shall we say? When Socrates had convinced Alcibiades, as we are told, that he had no distinctive qualifications as a man different from other people, and that in fact there was no difference between him, though a man of the highest rank, and a porter; and when Alcibiades became uneasy at this, and entreated Socrates, with tears in his eyes, to make him a man of virtue and to cure him of that mean position; what shall we say to this, Cleanthes? Was there no evil in what afflicted Alcibiades thus? What strange things does Lycon say? who, making light of grief, says that it arises from trifles, from things that affect our fortune or bodies, not from the evils of the mind. What, then? did not the grief of Alcibiades proceed from the defects and evils of the mind? I have already said enough of Epicurus’s consolation.