Whoever chides us to stop gazing towards the future and asks that we stay rooted in the present, content with the here and now, not anticipating what is coming nor holding on to our past, these voices commit a common human error. And that is, if we dare call an error something which nature makes impossible. To continue nature’s work, she impresses us with false imagination, more jealous of our actions than our knowledge.
We are never at home, we are always somewhere else. Fear, desire and hope push us into the future. They rob us of feeling and an appreciation of our being. They instead amuse us with what could be, even when we are no longer around to enjoy it.
A mind anxious about the future is calamitous. (Seneca)
This great precept is often quoted in Plato: Do your job and know thyself. These two admonitions complement each other. Whoever has to do his work understands that the first lesson is to recognize who he is and what talents are his own. And whoever fully recognizes himself stops taking the work of others as his own. He loves and cultivates himself above all else:
Just as foolishness, even if it has obtained what it desired, never thinks it has obtained enough: so wisdom is always content with what is present, and never regrets it. (Cicero)
Epicurus exempts his sage from foresight and care for the future.
Another solid law concerns the deceased and the examination of the actions of Princes after their death. Justice has little power over their reputation and the property of their successors. It is a proper custom of the nations that observe it: the memory of the wicked is treated as their own. We owe loyalty and obedience equally to our rulers, because it concerns their office, not the people. But we only owe esteem and affection to virtue.
Let the political order go on with its work of concealing their vices and helping move their indifferent actions with our support when authority needs it. But once our trade is finished, there is no reason to hide our true resentments and to refuse glory to those we reverently and faithfully served. Their imperfections were well known to them, so let posterity own that example.
As for the nostalgics who, out of respect for some private obligation, continue to espouse the memory of a despicable, unworthy price, there should be a special form of justice. Titus Livy described the language of men raised under royalty as always full of foolish ostentation and vain testimony. Everyone indiscriminately elevates his king to the extreme line of sovereign value and greatness.
I applaud the magnanimity of the two soldiers who answered Nero to his face. The first, asked why he wished him ill, replied: I loved you when you were worthy of love, but since you have become a parricide, a bully, a brawler, a coachman, I hate you as you deserve. The other, why he wanted to kill him: Because I can find no other remedy for your continual wickedness.
As for the public and universal testimonies that were given after his death, and will be given forever more of his tyrannical and vile behavior, who in their right mind can condemn them? I am displeased that in such a holy policy as the Lacedaemonian, such a false ceremony was mixed in.
At the death of the kings, all the confederates and neighbors, all the Helots, men, women, and children alike, cut their foreheads as a token of mourning and say in their cries and lamentations that this one, whoever he was, was the best king of them all. In doing so, they attribute honor to the lowest rank of merit.
Aristotle, who stirs all things, takes up Solon’s word that no one before his death can be called happy. Even he who has lived and died in an orderly manner cannot be said happy if his fame is in decline or if his posterity is miserable. While active, we are carried by our concerns wherever we please. But given that we are always in a state of becoming, we have no communication with pure being. And it would be better to say to Solon that no man is ever happy, since he is happy only after he ceases to exist.
Anyone hardly uprooted from life, he removes himself and casts him out: But he makes something of himself exist above the unconscious, Nor does he sufficiently remove himself from the body he has thrown away, and Vengeance. (Lucretius)
When Bartolomo Alviano, General of the Venetian army, died in the wars in Brescia, his body had to be brought back to Venice through Verona, enemy territory. Most of the army thought that safe-conduct should be requested from Verona. But Teodoro Trivulzio disagreed and chose to risk a conflict. “It is not fitting,” he said, “that he who in his life had never feared his enemies should show fear of them in death.”
Indeed, in a similar case, according to Greek law, asking an enemy for a body to bury was to renounce victory. Thus Nicias lost the advantage he had clearly gained over the Corinthians. And conversely, Agesilaus secured the one that was very dubiously gained over the Baeotians. These traits might be considered strange, if it were not an accepted custom not only to extend the concern we have for ourselves beyond this life, but also to believe that very often heavenly favors accompany us to the tomb, and continue to our relics.
There are so many ancient examples of this, not to mention our own, that there is no need to elaborate. Edward the First, King of England, having triumphed in numerous long wars with Robert, King of Scotland, believed his presence always brought victory. So when dying, he obliged his son by solemn oath that his body was to be boiled to detach the flesh from the bones, which he had buried. The bones would be carried with the English army whenever they entered war with the Scots.
As if fate had fatally attached victory to his limbs. Jean Vischa, who troubled Bohemia in defense of Wycliffe’s errors, wanted to be flayed after his death and to have his skin made into a drum to be led into war against his enemies, believing that this would help to continue the advantages he had over them. Some Indians carried the bones of one of their captains into battle against the Spanish, in consideration of the good fortune he had enjoyed in life. And other peoples in this same world take to war the corpses of valiant men who have died in their battles, to serve as good fortune and encouragement to them.
The first examples take to the grave only the reputation acquired by their past actions: but these still want to mix in the power to act. Captain Bayard, feeling mortally wounded by a harquebus shot in the body, was advised to withdraw from the melee. He replied that he would not turn his back on the enemy: and, having fought as long as he had strength, feeling himself faint and slipping from his horse, he commanded his hostel master to lay him down at the foot of a tree, propped up so that when he died, his face remained turned to the enemy.
I must add this most remarkable example. The Emperor Maximilian, great-grandfather of King Philip, was a prince endowed with many great qualities, and among others with a singular beautiful body. But he had a strange personality quirk — he did not have a personal valet and allowed no one to see him naked. He would steal away to take a leak, as pious as a virgin in not revealing to a doctor or anyone else his private parts. I am touched by his shame. Unless it is by great persuasion of necessity or voluptuousness, I do not permit my member to be observed in action. I suffer more constraint, which I do not consider becoming to a man, and especially to a man of my profession. But Emperor Maximilian became so superstitious that he expressly ordered in his will that he was to be dressed in underwear after his death. He added by codicil that the person who put them on should have his eyes bandaged.
The order that Cyrus made to his children, that neither they nor anyone else should see or touch his body after the soul had been separated from it, I attribute to some devotion. For both his historian and he, among their many qualities, have shown a singular care and reverence for religion throughout their lives.
This story was told to me by a great man who was related to me, a man well known in peace and war. For dying very old in his court, tormented by extreme pains of the stone, he demanded of everyone in his final hours that they attend his funeral, and summoned all the nobility who visited him to give him their word about attendance. Even a prince, who had seen him on these last occasions, received an urgent plea commanding his household to be present, using several examples and reasons to prove that he was worthy of such treatment. Having obtained this promise, he ordered the arrangement of the funeral. I have never seen vanity so perservering.
This other contrary curiosity seems to me to be akin to this one: to fret and fuss at the last stage over a funeral to effect some minuscule economy of one servant and one lantern. I see this attitude praised in the example of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who forbade his heirs to employ for him customary burial ceremonies. Is it still temperance and frugality to avoid the extravagance and sensuality, the use and knowledge of which is imperceptible to us? This is an easy reformation and one of little cost.
I would advise that in this, like other aspects of life, should relate relative to a person’s fortune. And the philosopher Lyco wisely prescribes to his friends to place his body where they think best, and as for the funeral to make them neither superfluous nor mechanical. I will leave it purely to custom to order this ceremony; and I will leave it to the discretion of the first to whom I shall fall in charge.
This whole place is to be despised in us, not neglected in ours. (Cicero)
And it is written by a Saint:
The care of a funeral, the condition of the burial, the pomp of the funeral are more a consolation for the living than a relief for the dead.(Augustine.)
Socrates said to Crito, who asked him at the hour of his death how he wished to be buried: “As you will,” he replied.
I would find it more gentlemanly to imitate those who, alive and breathing, enjoy the order and honor of their burial, and who take pleasure in seeing their dead countenance in marble. Happy are they who know how to rejoice and gratify their senses by insensibility, and live by their death.
I almost come to hate all popular democratic rule, however natural and fair it may seem to me, when I think of the inhuman injustice of the Athenian people, who put to death without reprieve or a hearing their brave captains, who had just won a naval battle against the Lacedaemonians near the Arginusian Isles, the most contested, the fiercest battle the Greeks had ever fought at sea with their own forces, because after the victory they had followed the opportunities that the law of war presented to them, rather than stop to collect and bury their dead.
And Diomedes’ behavior makes this execution even worse. This condemned man was of notable virtue, both military and political. Speaking first, after hearing of his and his colleagues’ condemnation, he expressed care for the preservation of the judges, praying to the gods to not turn their wrath upon them. And without saying anything else, without bargaining, he courageously set off at a brisk pace to face his punishment.
A few years later, fortune punished them. Chabrias, commander of the Athenian navy, won a battle against Pollis, admiral of Sparta, on the island of Naxos. However, he lost the fruits of his victory, a very important for their affairs, because he tried to avoid the misfortune of the previous example. In order not to lose a few of his friends’ dead bodies floating at sea, he allowed a world of living enemies to sail to safety, who later made the Athenians pay dearly for their importunate superstition.
Do you ask where you will lie after death? Where unborn women lie. (Seneca)
Another man restores the feeling of rest to a body without a soul:
Nor does it have a grave to receive, a haven for its body, where, human life having ended, the body may rest from evils. (Ennius, quoted by Cicero.)
Nature shows us that many dead things have occult relationships to life. Wine transforms in the cellar, according to certain seasonal changes of its vine. And venison changes its flavor and condition in the salting rooms,according to the laws of living flesh, so they say.