The Anatomy of Melancholy

Perhaps he died before his time, before reaching the prime of life; yet was he not mortal? Hear that divine Epictetus: “If you wish your wife, friends and children to live for ever, you are a fool.”

He was a fine child indeed, “worthy of Apollo’s tears”: a sweet, loving, beautiful, intelligent child of great promise, another Eteoneus, whom the poet Pindar and the orator Aristides so deeply lament. But who can tell whether he would have become an upright man? He might have turned out a thief, a scoundrel, a spendthrift or a disobedient son, and have vexed and hurt you more than all the rest of the world. He might have quarrelled with you, or with his brothers like Eteocles and Polynices, and broken your heart.

Now he has passed into eternity like another Ganymede in the flower of youth, as though, says Plutarch, he had risen midway through a feast before becoming drunk. The longer he had lived, the worse he would have become; “and the longer the life,” Ambrose thinks, “the more numerous the sins”: he would have been more sinful, with more to answer for.

If he was bad, you may be glad that he is gone; if good, be glad that you had such a son. Or are you certain that he was good? Perhaps he was a hypocrite, as many are; however pleasantly he spoke to you, perhaps he prayed with the others whom Icaromenippus heard at Jupiter’s whispering place in Lucian, asking for his father’s death because his father kept him short of money, and he would inherit much property and many fine estates when he died.

Or suppose he was very good: grant the best case. May not your dead son remonstrate with you, as the son does in the same Lucian? “Why do you lament my death, or call me miserable when I am much happier than you? What misfortune has befallen me? Is it because I am not bald, bent, old and decayed, as you are? What have I lost? Some of your good food, fine clothes, music, singing, dancing, kissing, merry gatherings and pleasures of the marriage bed—is that it?”

“Is it not much better never to be hungry than to eat; never to be thirsty than to drink to quench thirst; never to be cold than to put on clothes to drive away the cold? You have more reason to rejoice that I am free from diseases, fevers, cares, anxieties, spite, love, greed, hatred, envy and malice, and no longer fear thieves, tyrants and enemies as you do.”

Do you think the ashes and buried spirits care about that?

Do such things concern us at all, do you think, once we are dead? Do not, then, mourn others excessively; neither wish for nor fear your own death.

Neither wish for your last day nor fear it.

It serves no purpose.

I left life’s troubles readily and willingly, So that I should not henceforth see things worse than death itself.

I left this burdensome life with all my heart, Lest something worse than death should fall to my lot.