下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
1.
Scilicet ultima semper
Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus
Ante obitum nemo, supremaque funera debet.
[You must always await a man's last day: before his death and last funeral rites, no one should be called happy.]
There is a story about this which children know; it concerns King Croesus: having been taken by Cyrus and condemned to death, he cried out as he awaited execution, 'O Solon, Solon!' This was reported to Cyrus who inquired of him what it meant. Croesus explained to him that Solon had once given him a warning which he was now proving true to his own cost: that men, no matter how Fortune may smile on them, can never be called happy until you have seen them pass through the last day of their life, on account of the uncertainty and mutability of human affairs which lightly shift from state to state, each one different from the other. That is why Agesilaus replied to someone who called the King of Persia happy because he had come so young to so great an estate, 'Yes: but Priam was not wretched when he was that age.'
Descendants of Alexander the Great, themselves kings of Macedonia, became cabinet-makers and scriveners in Rome; tyrants of Sicily became school-teachers in Corinth. A conqueror of half the world, a general of numerous armies, became a wretched suppliant to the beggarly officials of the King of Egypt: that was the cost of five or six more months of life to Pompey the Great. And during our fathers' lifetime Ludovico Sforza, the tenth Duke of Milan, who for so long had been the driving force in Italy, was seen to die prisoner at Loches - but (and that was the worst of it) only after living there ten years. The fairest Queen, widow of the greatest King in Christendom, has she not just died by the hand of the executioner?
There are hundreds of other such examples. For just as storms and tempests seem to rage against the haughty arrogant height of our buildings, so it could seem that there are spirits above us, envious of any greatness here below.
Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam
Obterit, et pulchros fasces saevasque secures
Proculcare, ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur.
[Some hidden force apparently topples the affairs of men, seeming to trample down the resplendent fasces and the lictor's unyielding axe, holding them in derision.]
Fortune sometimes seems precisely to he in ambush for the last day of a man's life in order to display her power to topple in a moment what she had built up over the length of years, and to make us follow Laberius and exclaim: 'Nimirum hac die una plus vixi, mihi quam vivendum fuit.' [I have lived this day one day longer than I ought to have lived.]
2. The good counsel of Solon could be taken that way. But he was a philosopher: for such, the favours and ill graces of Fortune do not rank as happiness or unhappiness and for them great honours and powers are non-essential properties, counted virtually as things indifferent. So it seems likely to me that he was looking beyond that, intending to tell us that happiness in life (depending as it does on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest. In all the rest he can wear an actor's mask: those fine philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:
Nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res
[Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast. The mask is ripped off: reality remains.]
That is why all the other actions in our life must be tried on the touchstone of this final deed. It is the Master-day, the day which judges all the others; it is (says one of the Ancients)
the day which must judge all my years now past. The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart.
3. I note that several men by their death have given a good or bad reputation to their entire life. Scipio, Pompey's father-in-law, redeemed by a good death the poor opinion people had had of him until then. And when asked which of three men he judged most worthy of honour, Chabrias, Iphicrates or himself, Epaminondas replied, 'Before deciding that you must see us die.' (Indeed Epaminondas would be robbed of a great deal if anyone were to weigh his worth without the honour and greatness of his end.)
4. In my own times three of the most execrable and ill-famed men I have known, men plunged into every kind of abomination, died deaths which were well-ordered and in all respects perfectly reconciled: such was God's good pleasure.
5. Some deaths are fine and fortunate. I knew a man
whose thread of life was progressing towards brilliant preferment when it was snapped; his end was so splendid that, in my opinion, his great-souled search after honour held nothing so sublime as that snapping asunder: the goal he aimed for he reached before he had even set out; that was more grand and more glorious than anything he had wished or hoped for. As he fell he surpassed the power and reputation towards which his course aspired.
6. When judging another's life I always look to see how its end was borne: and one of my main concerns for my own is that it be borne well - that is, in a quiet and muted manner.