25
Crantor Mullach, Frag. Philor. Graec. iii. p. 149. says that not being to blame for one’s unhappy state is no small alleviation for misfortunes; but I should say that it surpasses all others as a remedy for the cure of grief. But affection and love for the departed does not consist in distressing ourselves, but in benefiting the beloved one; and a benefit for those who have been taken away is the honour paid to them through keeping their memory green. For no good man, after he is dead, is deserving of lamentations, but of hymns and songs of joy; not of mourning, but of an honourable memory; not of sorrowing tears, but of offerings of sacrifice,—if the departed one is now a partaker in some life more divine, relieved of servitude to the body, and of these everlasting cares and misfortunes which those who have received a mortal life as their portion are constrained to undergo until such time as they shall complete their allotted earthly existence, which Nature has not given to us for eternity; but she has distributed to us severally the apportioned amount in accordance with the laws of fate.
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Wherefore, over those who die men of good sense ought not to be carried away by sorrow beyond the natural and moderate limit of grief, which so affects the soul, into useless and barbarian mourning, and they ought not to wait for that outcome which has already been the lot of many in the past, the result of which is that they terminate their own lives in misery before they have put off their mourning, and gain nothing but a forlorn burial in their garments of sorrow, as their woes and the ills born of their unreasonableness follow them to the grave, so that one might utter over them the verse of Homer: Combined from Il. xxiii. 109, and Od. i. 423 (=Od. xviii. 306). While they were weeping and wailing black darkness descended upon them.
