is no real evil in the circumstance for
which you grieve, and not from the length of time, that you procure a
remedy for your grief.

XXXI. Here some people talk of moderate grief; but if such be natural,
what occasion is there for consolation? for nature herself will
determine, the measure of it: but if it depends on and is caused by
opinion, the whole opinion should be destroyed. I think that it has
been sufficiently said, that grief arises from an opinion of some
present evil, which includes this belief, that it is incumbent on us to
grieve. To this definition Zeno has added, very justly, that the
opinion of this present evil should be recent. Now this word recent
they explain thus: those are not the only recent things which happened
a little while ago; but as long as there shall be any force, or vigor,
or freshness in that imagined evil, so long it is entitled to the name
of recent. Take the case of Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus, King of
Caria, who made that noble sepulchre at Halicarnassus; while she lived,
she lived in grief, and died of it, being worn out by it, for that
opinion was always recent with her: but you cannot call that recent
which has already begun to decay through time. Now the duty of a
comforter is, to remove grief entirely, to quiet it, or draw it off as
much as you can, or else to keep it under, and prevent its spreading
any further, and to divert one's attention to other matters. There are
some who think, with Cleanthes, that the only duty of a comforter is to
prove that what one is lamenting is by no means an evil. Others, as the
Peripatetics, prefer urging that the evil is not great. Others, with
Epicurus, seek to divert your attention from the evil to good: some
think it sufficient to show that nothing has happened but what you had
reason to expect; and this is the practice of the Cyrenaics. But
Chrysippus thinks that the main thing in comforting is, to remove the
opinion from the person who is grieving, that to grieve is his bounden
duty. There are others who bring together all these various kinds of
consolations, for people are differently affected; as I have done
myself in my book on Consolation; for as my own mind was much
disordered, I have attempted in that book to discover every method of
cure. But the proper season is as much to be attended to in the cure of
the mind as of the body; as Prometheus in AEschylus, on its being said
to him,

I think, Prometheus, you this tenet ho