357ON THE COMMONWEALTH.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Cicero, Marcus Tullius and Yonge, Charles Duke
Shall I adore, and bend the suppliant knee,
Who scorn their power and doubt their deity?
Does not Niobe here seem to reason, and by that reasoning to bring all her misfortunes upon herself? But what a subtle expression is the following!
On strength of will alone depends success;
a maxim capable of leading us into all that is bad.
Though I’m confined, his malice yet is vain,
His tortured heart shall answer pain for pain;
His ruin soothe my soul with soft content,
Lighten my chains, and welcome banishment!
This, now, is reason; that reason which you say the divine goodness has denied to the brute creation, kindly to bestow it on men alone. How great, how immense the favor! Observe the same Medea flying from her father and her country:
The guilty wretch from her pursuer flies.
By her own hands the young Absyrtus slain,
His mangled limbs she scatters o’er the plain,
That the fond sire might sink beneath his woe,
And she to parricide her safety owe.
Reflection, as well as wickedness, must have been necessary to the preparation of such a fact; and did he too, who prepared that fatal repast for his brother, do it without reflection?
Revenge as great as Atreus’ injury
Shall sink his soul and crown his misery.
XXVII. Did not Thyestes himself, not content with having defiled his brother’s bed (of which Atreus with great justice thus complains,
When faithless comforts, in the lewd embrace,
With vile adultery stain a royal race,
The blood thus mix’d in fouler currents flows,
Taints the rich soil, and breeds unnumber’d woes)—
343did he not, I say, by that adultery, aim at the possession of the crown? Atreus thus continues:
A lamb, fair gift of heaven, with golden fleece,
Promised in vain to fix my crown in peace;
But base Thyestes, eager for the prey,
Crept to my bed, and stole the gem away.
Do you not perceive that Thyestes must have had a share of reason proportionable to the greatness of his crimes—such crimes as are not only represented to us on the stage, but such as we see committed, nay, often exceeded, in the common course of life? The private houses of individual citizens, the public courts, the senate, the camp, our allies, our provinces, all agree that reason is the author of all the ill, as well as of all the good, which is done; that it makes few act well, and that but seldom, but many act ill, and that frequently; and that, in short, the Gods would have shown greater benevolence in denying us any reason at all than in sending us that which is accompanied with so much mischief; for as wine is seldom wholesome, but often hurtful in diseases, we think it more prudent to deny it to the patient than to run the risk of so uncertain a remedy; so I do not know whether it would not be better for mankind to be deprived of wit, thought, and penetration, or what we call reason, since it is a thing pernicious to many and very useful to few, than to have it bestowed upon them with so much liberality and in such abundance. But if the divine will has really consulted the good of man in this gift of reason, the good of those men only was consulted on whom a well-regulated one is bestowed: how few those are, if any, is very apparent. We cannot admit, therefore, that the Gods consulted the good of a few only; the conclusion must be that they consulted the good of none.
XXVIII. You answer that the ill use which a great part of mankind make of reason no more takes away the goodness of the Gods, who bestow it as a present of the greatest benefit to them, than the ill use which children make of their patrimony diminishes the obligation which they have to their parents for it. We grant you this; but where is the similitude? It was far from Deianira’s design to injure Hercules when she made him a present 344of the shirt dipped in the blood of the Centaurs. Nor was it a regard to the welfare of Jason of Pheræ that influenced the man who with his sword opened his imposthume, which the physicians had in vain attempted to cure. For it has often happened that people have served a man whom they intended to injure, and have injured one whom they designed to serve; so that the effect of the gift is by no means always a proof of the intention of the giver; neither does the benefit which may accrue from it prove that it came from the hands of a benefactor. For, in short, what debauchery, what avarice, what crime among men is there which does not owe its birth to thought and reflection, that is, to reason? For all opinion is reason: right reason, if men’s thoughts are conformable to truth; wrong reason, if they are not.
The Gods only give us the mere faculty of reason, if we have any; the use or abuse of it depends entirely upon ourselves; so that the comparison is not just between the present of reason given us by the Gods, and a patrimony left to a son by his father; for, after all, if the injury of mankind had been the end proposed by the Gods, what could they have given them more pernicious than reason? for what seed could there be of injustice, intemperance, and cowardice, if reason were not laid as the foundation of these vices?
XXIX. I mentioned just now Medea and Atreus, persons celebrated in heroic poems, who had used this reason only for the contrivance and practice of the most flagitious crimes; but even the trifling characters which appear in comedies supply us with the like instances of this reasoning faculty; for example, does not he, in the Eunuch, reason with some subtlety?—
What, then, must I resolve upon?
She turn’d me out-of-doors; she sends for me back again;
Shall I go? no, not if she were to beg it of me.
Another, in the Twins, making no scruple of opposing a received maxim, after the manner of the Academics, asserts that when a man is in love and in want, it is pleasant
To have a father covetous, crabbed, and passionate,
Who has no love or affection for his children.
345This unaccountable opinion he strengthens thus:
You may defraud him of his profits, or forge letters in his name,