Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.15

M. What will you say? What do you imagine that so many and such great men of our republic, who have sacrificed their lives for its good, expected? Do you believe that they thought that their names should not continue beyond their lives? None ever encountered death for their country but under a firm persuasion of immortality! 

 

Themistocles might have lived at his ease; so might Epaminondas; and, not to look abroad and among the ancients for instances, so might I myself. But, somehow or other there clings to our minds a certain presage of future ages; and this both exists most firmly, and appears most clearly, in men of the loftiest genius and greatest souls. Take away this, and who would be so mad as to spend his life amidst toils and dangers? I speak of those in power. What are the poet’s views but to be ennobled after death? What else is the object of these lines,

 

“Behold old Ennius here, who erst

Thy fathers’ great exploits rehearsed?”

 

He is challenging the reward of glory from those men whose ancestors he himself had ennobled by his poetry. And in the same spirit he says, in another passage,

 

“Let none with tears my funeral grace, for I

Claim from my works an immortality.”

 

Why do I mention poets? The very mechanics are desirous of fame after death. Why did Phidias include a likeness of himself in the shield of Minerva, when he was not allowed to inscribe his name on it? What do our philosophers think on the subject? Do not they put their names to those very books which they write on the contempt of glory?

 

If, then, universal consent is the voice of nature, and if it is the general opinion everywhere that those who have quitted this life are still interested in something, we also must subscribe to that opinion. And if we think that men of the greatest abilities and virtues see most clearly into the power of nature, because they themselves are her most perfect work, it is very probable that, as every great man is especially anxious to benefit posterity, there is something of which he himself will be sensible after death.

 

In so many different ways, it seems we cannot help but think of ourselves as immortal. Whatever form that sense of permanence may take, from leaving behind the effects of our works to a collective memory, to joining the gods in the heavens, we feel as if the end will not really be a final end. 

 

What Cicero calls a “universal consent” on the matter sounds something like the instinctive way we breathe or blink. It does not require philosophy for us to know it, and it shows itself unconsciously in all aspects of our lives. 

 

I have often wondered how the noble figures from history could manage to face so many setbacks and hardships, and why they didn’t just throw in the towel and retire to a quiet life in the country. Cicero may be describing what urged them on, at least with the best of them. They understood that what they did was meant forever, not merely for now. 

 

The scale does not need to be so epic. I have also wondered how an anonymous young man, barely old enough to shave, could go off to war, along with thousands like him, and die in a distant land, to be buried without any fanfare. His mother may cry for him, but no one else will remember him. I am sure I couldn’t be so brave, until I remember that a man can bear most anything if he believes that his sacrifice will matter, that by his passing he did something worthy for all time. 

 

I am only myself, a small piece easily overlooked, though I might yet make a difference for the whole, and thereby survive within the whole. Men will move mountains for that chance, and they will hope for the power to somehow appreciate the fruits of their labors after their deaths. 

 

Being remembered then becomes subservient to being able to remember for oneself. It may not be true because it is wished, but it may be wished because it happens to be true. 

 

Back in high school, I knew a fellow who followed the usual modern intellectual party line, that there was no God, and there was no afterlife. He was surprised when I was sympathetic to his view that how he lived now was more important than whatever might happen after he died. I suggested that any worth in a future state would depend upon a worth in this state, as an effect proceeds from a cause. 

 

“Well, I suppose I’d like to know that I was responsible for some changes, for some good changes.”

 

“If knowing that means something to you, then what you’re knowing will go far beyond the span of your life. That seems a bit like a kind of immortality to me.”

 

We liked one another enough that he was willing to grant my point, and I was willing to be happy that we had a little something in common. 

Written in 3/1996