The nurse of lusty children I have come, To supplicate you, from the mourning pits.And some of the barbarians even cut off parts of their bodies, their noses and ears, and mutilate other portions of their bodies also, thinking to gratify the dead by abandoning that moderation of feeling which Nature enjoins in such cases.
Wherefore very excellently Plato 1 appears to advise us
‘in’ such ‘misfortunes to maintain a calm demeanour,
since neither the evil nor the good in them is at all plain, and since
no advance is made by the man who takes things much to heart. For grief
stands in the way of sane counsel about an event and prevents one from
arranging his affairs with relation to what has befallen, as a player
does at a throw of the dice, in whatever way reason may convince him
would be best. We ought not, therefore, when we have fallen to act like
children and hold on to the injured place and scream, but we should
accustom our soul speedily to concern itself with curing the injury and
raising up the fallen, and we should put away lamentation by remedial
art.’
They say that the lawgiver of the Lyclans 2 ordered his citizens, whenever they
mourned, to clothe themselves first in women's garments and then to mourn,
wishing to make it clear that mourning is womanish and unbecoming to
decorous men who lay claim to the education of the free-born. Yes, mourning
is verily feminine, and weak, and ignoble, since [p. 167] women
are more given to it than men, and barbarians more than Greeks, and inferior
men more than better men ; and of the barbarians themselves, not the most
noble, Celts and Galatians, and all who by nature are filled with a more
manly spirit, but rather, if such there are, the Egyptians and Syrians and
Lydians and all those who are like them. For it is recorded that some of
these go down into pits and remain there for several days, not desiring even
to behold the light of the sun since the deceased also is bereft of it. At
any rate the tragic poet Ion,3 who was not without knowledge
of the foolishness of these peoples, has represented a woman as saying :