For my own part, I cannot say that it was honourable in the Athenians to crown themselves with garlands and offer sacrifices to the gods on the death of a king who, in the midst of his successes, had treated them so mildly and humanely in their reverses; for besides provoking the indignation of the gods, it was also an ignoble thing to honour him while he was alive and make him a citizen of Athens, but when he had fallen by another’s hand to set no bounds to their joy, nay, to leap as it were, upon the dead, and sing paeans of victory, as if they themselves had wrought a deed of valour.
And apart from these considerations, if it is our duty not to allow the unfortunate to lie comfortless in his sorrow, but to address him with cheering words and turn his thoughts to pleasanter things (like those who tell people with sore eyes to withdraw their gaze from bright and hard colours and fix it upon those which are soft and green), how can a man obtain better consolation for his domestic griefs than by blending them with the general welfare of a prosperous country, thus making the better things obscure the worse? These things, then, I have been led to say on seeing that many have their hearts softened to effeminate pity by this discourse of Aeschines.
Demosthenes. Plutarch. Bernadotte Perrin (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1919.
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