10 Oct The language addressed to us by friends and real helpers should mitigate, not vindicate, what distresses us; it is not partners in tears and lamentation, like tragic choruses, that we need in unwished-for circumstances, but men who speak frankly and instruct us… (PLUTARCH)
The essay is evidently addressed to an exile from Sardis, probably at the moment in Athens, who has been plausibly identified with the Menemachus of Sardis for whom Plutarch wrote the essay Praecepta Gerendae Reipublicae. Plutarch does not state the terms of exile, except to say that his friend was not banished to one specified area, but could travel freely so long as he did not return home.
On Exile
As it is with our friends, so it is with the words we speak: best and most to be depended upon, we are told, are those which appear in adversity to some purpose and give help; for many people visit the unfortunate and talk to them, but their efforts do no good, or rather do harm. These people are like men unable to swim who try to rescue the drowning — they hug them close and help to drag them under. The language addressed to us by friends and real helpers should mitigate, not vindicate, what distresses us; it is not partners in tears and lamentation, like tragic choruses, that we need in unwished-for circumstances, but men who speak frankly and instruct us that grief and self-abasement are everywhere futile, that to indulge in them is unwarranted and unwise, and that where the facts themselves, when reason has groped them out and brought them to light, enable a man to say to himself
You’ve not been hurt, unless you so pretend, it is utterly absurd not to ask the body what it has suffered, or the soul whether it is the worse for this mischance, but instead to seek instruction in grief from those who come from the outside world to join their vexation and resentment to our own.
Let us, therefore, withdraw from the world and taking our calamities one by one examine their weight, as if they were so many loads; for while the burden felt by the body is the actual weight of the thing that presses upon it, the soul often adds the heaviness to circumstances from itself. It is by nature that stone is hard, it is by nature that ice is cold; it is not from outside themselves, fortuitously, that they convey the sensation of rigidity and freezing; but banishment, loss of fame, and loss of honours, like their opposites, crowns, public office, and front-seat privileges, whose measure of causing sorrow and joy is not their own nature, but our judgment, everyone makes light or heavy for himself, and easy to bear or the reverse. We can listen on the one hand to Polyneices, when, on being asked
What is the loss of country? A great ill?
The greatest; and no words can do it justice;
On the other hand, we can hear what Alcman has to say, as the author of the little epigram has represented him:
Sardis, of old the sojourn of my sires, Had I been bred in thee, then had I been Some priest or temple eunuch, tricked in gold, Smiting the painted timbrels; now instead My name is Alcman, and my country Sparta, City of many tripods; I have been taught The Hellenic Muses, who have raised me high Above the despots Dascyles and Gyges
Thus opinion had made the same event useful for the one, as it makes a coin pass current, but useless and harmful to the other.
Plutarch’s Morals
Plutarch
