remedy for your constant evil deeds.”[1] But what sound understanding can blame the public and universal testimonies to his tyrannical and degrading conduct, which were borne after his death, and will be for all time, against him and all evil-doers like him?[2]
I can but regret that in so immaculate a polity as the Lacedæmonian there should have been introduced such an insincere ceremony at the death of their kings. All the federated states and their neighbours, and all the Helots, men and women pell-mell, slashed their foreheads as evidence of their grief, and declared amid their cries and lamentations that this king, whatever he had been, was the best of all their kings, ascribing to rank the praise which belonged to merit, and that which belongs to the highest merit, to the lowest degree.[3] Aristotle, who touches on all subjects, questions about the saying of Solon, that “no one before he is dead can be said to be happy,” whether even the man who has lived and died as he could wish can be called happy if his renown grow less, if his posterity be wretched. While we are alive, we are by anticipation wherever we choose; but having ceased to be, we have no communication with what is; and therefore Solon had better have said that man is never happy, since he is so only after he has ceased to exist.[4][4]
Quisquam
Vix radicitus e vita se tollit, et eiicit:
Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inscius ipse,
Nec removet satis a projecto corpore sese et
Vindicat.[5]
- ↑ See Tacitus, Annals, XV, 67, 68.
- ↑ The last phrase, à luy et à tous meschans comme luy, was added in 1595.
- ↑ See Herodotus, VI, 58.
- ↑ See the Nicomachæan Ethics, I, 10.
- ↑ The man who imperfectly uproots himself from life and casts himself out of it, but who unconsciously conceives something of himself to survive, does not sufficiently remove himself from the body that is thrown out, and lays claim to it. — Lucretius, III, 877, 878, 882, 883. The numbering here followed is that adopted by Cyril Bailey in the Oxford texts. Quisquam is an addition of Montaigne’s. The original has Nec instead of Vix in the second line, and, at the end, et illum se fingit, instead of sese et vindicat.
